Self Psychology as a “Postmodern” Science

In the early 1930s, the billboards of England carried advertisements for paint in which white-coated workmen spelled out the brand name by painting its successive letters on the backs of the men in front of them. This memory captures for me one of the paradoxical features of human self-knowledge: the way in which the different humanistic disciplines comment on one another's insights, by presenting interpretations that are seemingly contradictory, but end by proving complementary. Historians bring to light overlooked influences of past factors on present ideas and actions; anthropologists reveal hidden connections between different cultural practices; political scientists underline the unspoken interests of different social groups, psychoanalysts draw attention to unconscious personal motives underlying public actions; and so on, and so on. Every scholar “paints” a fresh comment onto his predecessor's view, and nobody ever has the last, authoritative word.

At times, there seems to be no way of breaking out of this “circle” and arriving at interpretations that have any assurance of truth or reliability. So, neocritical theorists of the Frankfurt School (for instance, Habermas) invoke such considerations as a reason for seeing the received wisdom of “late capitalist” societies as being irremediably distorted by unacknowledged influences and in this way