The Pursuit of Authenticity and the Plight of Self-Deception: Commentary on Paper by Slavin and Kriegman

Despite his general contempt for philosophy and philosophers, perhaps the greatest legacy of Freud to Western civilization is his taking its cornerstone pursuit of truth out of the realm of rationality and pure reason and extending it to the realm of the irrational and the unconscious. In this way, even if unwittingly, he has endowed us with a “science of subjectivity” (Lear, 1995) to which we are all his grateful heirs. This pursuit of truth, finally wrestled from the realm of so-called objectivity, has returned us to the central admonition of Polonius, “This above all—to thine own self be true.” Is there any greater reason than this to put all the “blood, sweat, and tears” into the psychoanalytic endeavor?

I think that in the pairing of Slavin and Kriegman's paper with my own we see two sets of authors on the same journey, though perhaps coming at it from somewhat differing trajectories or at least semantical emphases, ones that may prove to create some subtle differences amidst a many of similarities. In both cases, we believe that, to a considerable extent, the paradoxical nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise is a byproduct of the participants' attempts to be true to themselves, even when that truth is unconsciously lost upon them. My assertion of this principle, as stated in my paper is:

It is my belief that at least one potential precursor state [to the creation of the double bind scenario] may be that, on the needed relationship level, an unwitting clash occurs between what the patient “needs” to develop authentically and what the therapist “needs” to practice authentically … thus catapulting both parties back to the repeated relationship level wherein a particular