Can the Subaltern Speak?
(1993)
A challenge is offered to the characterization of psychoanalysis as suffering from potentially fatal epistemic flaws and needing to ground itself in the language of hermeneutics, neuropsychology, or infant observation in order to survive. Psychoanalytic truth is neither made up nor discovered. Psychoanalytic propositions are true in the important sense of being the most useful statements we can make right now about the nature and functioning of the human unconscious. Psychoanalytic theories evolve through rational critical discourse just as theories evolve in all fields of science and scholarship.
The hermeneutic turn in psychoanalysis may be less a move toward soft science than an attempt to address certain failures in the classical tradition. The latter has failed to convert Freud's many metaphors into anything like responsible science it has been unable to give up its fascination with Freud and move on to other thinkers and other points of view it has been unable to find an answer to the problem of secrecy and privileged access to clinical data under the heavy hand of theory, it has all but eliminated research from the psychoanalytic enterprise and finally, it has been unable to find a home for the Roshomon effect and the fact that almost everything worth looking at has at least two sides. Above all, psychoanalysis needs to recognize that our theory is often the projection of either our Zeitgeist or our personal history. Until we can make room for the problem of subjectivity in our theory-building, we will never be able to separate the singer from the song.