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narrative that, for certain purposes, we take to be true and final." And
Richard Geha, adopting the most extreme position of all, writes that
"everything is a manifestation of the aesthetic faculty"; to him, the
"psychoanalytic enterprise is totally fictional" and should become "more
decidedly a branch ofliterature."
This transformation of the field's self-understanding might be seen as
part of the "flight from history" which Frank Kermode has discerned in
the interpretive disciplines in general. There are many who would hail
this flight for its presumably liberating effects, among them the French
analyst Serge Viderman. Viderman writes that the analyst should give up
the vain hope of discovering "a history nowhere to be found," for this
"elusive reality . . . imposes inconsistencies prejudicial to the coherence of
our theoretical formulations." In his view, the search for historical reality
shackles the imagination. It unnecessarily constrains the psychoanalytic
encounter, whose true purpose is the active
creation
of meanings, not the
discovery of meanings in archaic experiences that, in themselves, "have
no structure, no figurable shape." Donald Spence takes a similar position
in his elegant and widely praised book,
Narrative Truth and Historical Truth.
Insisting on the inherent difficulty, amounting in his view almost to an
impossibility, of discovering the factual truth about a patient's past life,
Spence proposes that the therapist should understand his own
interpretations as really involving an "aesthetic experience," claiming
"artistic truth ." It is as if Spence and Viderman were applying to
psychoanalysis the defense of artifice which Oscar Wilde once suggested
for literature: "As life has no shape and literature has, literature is
throwing away its one distinctive quality when it tries to imitate life."
There are at least a couple of different ways of evaluating these fash–
ionable positions and claims. The more obvious approach is to ask about
the general validity of the versions of relativism, skepticism, and fictional–
ism that they propound, to test the internal consistency of these positions
and the cogency of their dismissals of alternative conceptions of
knowledge . That is not my purpose here, but I would like to say in pass–
ing that most of these postmodernist claims, especially the more extreme
ones, depend on the naive acceptance of certain dichotomies. The
greatest thinkers of twentieth-century philosophy (Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, as well as more recent figures such as Hilary
Putnam) have tried to overcome, in their various ways, these di–
chotomies; for example, those between subjective and objective views of
truth and reason, and between absolute certainty and utter skepticism.
Indeed, there is something surprising about the excited, celebratory tone
with which these recent recyclings of familiar forms of relativism,
fictionalism, or idealism are so often received in psychology and
