Illusions of Candor: Reply to Sass

While working on this response to Louis Sass's scathing critique of my essay on a psychoanalytic epistemology, I came across a quote so close in spirit and content to one of my key arguments that I could not resist using it to open my remarks here. The author, describing a particular epistemological position he found useful and compelling, wrote that “although it does not proffer the Cartesian dream of absolute certainty,” it does “hold out the promise of a valid and public kind of knowledge—one based not on some kind of timeless certainty but on the relative persuasiveness, within a particular interpretive community, of the various interpretations offered.” The author has the same target in sight as I did—the Cartesian fantasy of absolute certainty. He urges us to give up the hope for “timeless certainty,” a sentiment obviously identical in spirit to my argument against the quest for certainty. Finally, he argues for the viability of equating the truth-value of an argument with its persuasiveness within the professional conversations taking place within a particular established discipline.

The striking similarities between this author's position and mine might lead one to assume that Sass would find him to be as much of a misguided relativist as he accused me of being. That is unlikely, however, because the author is Sass (1988, p. 254). So why, I was forced to ask, is he saying those terrible things about me for taking a position he apparently also espouses? There are two clues to this mystery in his essay: he focuses on my use of the word “conversation,” and he spends a great deal of time discussing a criticism I made of a criticism he made of Donald Spence in 1988. Somehow, Sass equates my use of the word “conversation” with Richard Geha's use of the word “fiction.” He writes as if he read me to mean that by calling psychoanalysis a conversation, it has nothing to do with the quest for truth. I made it very clear, however, that I view all scientific and