TY - JOUR A1 - Bader, Michael J. T1 - Is self-disclosure a personal proclivity or a principle of technique?. Reply to commentary JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 08 (1998), pp. 001-032. N2 - Social-constructivist and other postmodern currents within contemporary psychoanalysis put a great premium on an epistemological critique of positivism and the authority of the analyst. This focus on the essential ambiguity and constructed nature of experience implicitly tilts the analyst's interest away from a disciplined attempt to develop systems of validation that rely on observable patient responses as confirmatory data with which to judge the analyst's interventions and understandings. As a result, even while defending themselves against charges of relativism and solipsism, many postmodern writers still tend to idealize uncertainty and implicitly discourage the clinician from seeking greater accuracy and clarity about the patient. Epistemic doubt and an ethic that celebrates surprise, although useful as a corrective to tendencies toward rigidity and arrogance in technique, unnecessarily clouds the ubiquitous existence and possibility of accurate intersubjective understanding. This bias can be seen as historically linked to similar processes in academia in which progressive intellectuals abandoned a social change agenda in response to a growing political conservatism and cultural cynicism and, instead, became increasingly involved in >theory for its own sake.< Similarly, the epistemological position of the postmodernists sponsors a bias against therapeutic activism and inadvertently rationalizes a growing pessimism in our own clinical practice. Y1 - 1998 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bader, Michael J. T1 - J. D. Sutherland in memoriam JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 08 (1998), pp. 061-078. Y1 - 1998 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bader, Michael J. T1 - More Metaphor: Commentary on Paper by Ken Corbett JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 08 (1998), pp. 583-587. Y1 - 1998 ER -