Plea for a Measure of Analytic Objectivity: Commentary on Gerhardt and Stinson

I am happy to say that what i have come to dread these days from a paper whose title (or subtitle) contains the phrase “analytic subjectivity” did not materialize. On the contrary, I was hugely heartened by Gerhard and Stinson's engrossing paper, which recovers a number of crucial psychoanalytic tenets that have been provisionally buried in a current riot of innovation on the psychoanalytic scene.

One of the points Gerhard and Stinson are making in this intelligent and edifying paper is that it is not only possible but also desirable to be objective about another's subjectivity, and they go on to construct a sensible and not unfamiliar means for achieving this. Like subjectivity, objectivity is a feasible state of mind that can be brought about by particular conditions. This is not news. However, a lot of obfuscation about the matter still lingers on, so that the authors' arguments are no less urgent these days than they would have been formerly. In a paper of mine that goes back over 20 years (Kaplan, 1973), I coined the term “procedural instrumentation” for such conditions and quoted a passage from a paper by G. G. Simpson on the problem of objectivity in situations of which we are a part.

The passage is worth repeating:

To say that we cannot learn anything materially factual about a situation if we ourselves are in it is utter and nonsensical negation of the very meaning of learning. The essential in objectivity is not the pretense of eliminating ourselves from a situation in which we are objectively present. It is that the situation should not be interpreted in terms of ourselves but that our roles should be interpreted realistically in terms of the situation [p. 33].