PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH.

ABSTRACT

After briefly reviewing Freud's search for "the truth" in psychoanalytic treatments, the author discusses Bion's views on truth and its prominence in his thinking. The author then addresses various definitions of truth, drawing particularly on recent comments by Ogden (2015). Considerations of the relationship between truth and philosophy, and of that between truth and the arts, follow; the author then returns to a focus on psychoanalytic truth as emergent. Our view of the latter has been strongly influenced, he notes, by changing views of therapeutic action and the goals of psychoanalysis.