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.
From the very beginning of the history of human ideas, there has been an ongoing debate about the validity of perception and communication. Does what we see—and what we say we see—bear any resemblance to the way the world actually is? If so, how much? In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon began a line of thinking that ultimately led to modem science with its objectivist epistemology. His suspicions about humans as accurate observers were pronounced: “Man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man and not to the universe; and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects … and distort and disfigure them” ( Novum Organum, i, 41). Empirical tests become essential when the human mind is considered to be such a source of distortion.
Two and a half centuries later, within a culture completely dominated by the epistemology of Western science, Freud began his training as a