This article discusses binary, or dichotomous, thinking as it develops in normal classification, in pathological splitting, and in shifts of cultural awareness such as that from Classicism to Romanticism. It relates these to states of subjective and objective self-awareness as induced and regulated by the early parental environment. A number of clinical examples demonstrate how pathological splitting may arise and how the therapeutic process works to alter dichotomous thinking and raise it to higher levels of integration. It also suggests that a similar process of integration can take place over time in our historical understanding of cultural paradigm shifts. We do not know the Hells and Heavens of people we pass in the street. There are two possible perspectives. According to the first, on a miniscule ball of earth, in a smudge of mold called a city, some microorganisms move around, less durable than mayflies. And the internal states of [such] beings, deprived of any reason for their existence, perfectly interchangeable, what importance can they have? According to the second perspective, that of a reversed telescope, every one of these beings grows up to the size of a cathedral and surpasses in its complexity any nature, living or inert. Only in the second case can we see that no two persons are identical and that we may at best try to guess what is going on inside our fellow men [Milosz, 1986, p. 120].
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.
J. D. Sutherland in memoriam
(1998)
In a Glass Darkly
(1998)