Social Construction and Psychoanalytic Promise: Commentary on Paper by Michael J. Bader

In responding to Bader's challenging discussion of the postmodern retreat from psychoanalysis, it is first essential to position myself. Epistemological critiques of objectivity, truth, essentialism, universalism, and the narrative of progress can generally be traced to two primary, but quite different, logics. On the one hand, there is a family of what may be viewed as psychologically based critiques. Whether growing from the soil of Continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, constructivist psychology, Gadamerian hermeneutics, critical theory, or the Kuhnian account of scientific revolution, the general presumption is that mental process exerts a force on the individual's perception and/or conception of reality. Because there is no account of the real that is not influenced by mental process, there is no “god's eye view” enabling us to adjudicate competing accounts, thus no truth, objectivity, or progress that can transcend the individual standpoint.

In contrast to the psychological approach, a second domain of epistemological critique is essentially social in character. Issuing largely from dialogues in semiotics, poststructuralist literary theory, rhetorical theory, Wittgensteinian philosophy, social studies of science, and discourse analysis, the primary emphasis in this case is on the relation between language and its object. Because “whatever is” makes no necessary demands on our language (descriptions, explanations), such theorists contend that our language serves to construct what we take