You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Freud's time, the traditional view of science, the one associated with modernity,* provided a broad invigorating, and reassuring scaffolding in which to place psychoanalysis and other human sciences. But today that scaffolding does not and cannot sustain us in the way it did Freud and his contemporaries (Mitchell, 1988).
Freud's archeological model of psychoanalysis fit within the traditional view of science. A hallmark of that epistemology is its assumption that an unbiased observer can stand outside what is observed, record it objectively, and report it in neutral language. In the archeological model, the analyst stands apart from the patient, observes the patient's behavior, especially the patient's speech, records and interprets it, and reports it to colleagues in a manner calculated to depict it accurately. This view of science is bound up with notions of rationality, objectivity, and truth.
The archeological model and the epistemology from which it emerged assumed a single meaning of reality. This assumption has been challenged in recent decades and two prominent voices questioning it are psychoanalysis and feminism. Both challenge the idea of a single meaning of reality discovered by an unbiased observer. Both argue that keeping the subject separate from the object, as the traditional scientific perspective would have it, is not only impossible