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At the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise is the purpose of examining the ways in which thoughts and behaviors, beliefs, preferences, and values are influenced by unconscious mental processes. Psychoanalysis is a discipline that fosters skepticism about the apparent self-evident meaning of surface phenomena, thereby challenging the certainty of either revealed or objective truth; the first (religion) explicitly, the second (science) implicitly. Like philosophy, it alerts us to the fact that we must look for the underlying values and ideology implicit in any body of knowledge, including psychoanalysis itself.
No cultural enterprise is value free, not even science. Science values “objective” knowledge. That “objectivity” is fundamental to the pursuit of science is seen in the historical fact that science is an achievement of Western culture, not an autonomous development in every culture. Yet, as Kuhn (1962) has pointed out, scientific research is based on beliefs about the nature of the world that appear to be objective and truthful but that may be superceded