Truth

The Concept of Truth and its Relevance to Psychoanalysis

What is truth? The word itself is obfuscating. Etymologically, it derives from the Old English tre-owth, meaning loyalty, fidelity—and hence being faithful, a pledging of trust. Today it often signifies conformity to facts or accordance with what is real; but truth claims are also adjudicated by the conveyed intent of the subject’s sincerity and honesty about statements in relation to a proven standard. The former definition is what we often associate with a theory of truth: whatever is stated to be true must correspond to actuality. We see this in Plato. In the Timaeus he states, “As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief” (29c). Here Plato is emphasizing the distinction between what is “lasting,” “irrefutable,” “permanent and intelligible” (29b) from what is merely a changing “copy or likeness” of the former, the dialectic between reality and thought. Just as belief approximates truth, we can never know “the eternal things in themselves” (29c). Elsewhere, in the Gorgias, while adopting the persona of Socrates, Plato concedes, “I do not speak with any pretense to knowledge, but am searching along with you” (506a). We may say that these passages anticipate the correspondence theory of truth: a true assertion corresponds to a state of affairs in reality to which it refers. Truth is what we discover, an independent and intelligible objective fact or datum that corresponds to our mental apprehension of it.

The universal statement “This is truth” is in fact a metaphysical assertion of predication, namely, that which is, although truth is typically classified as an epistemological category. Truth presupposes being (ὄv, esse) or presence. Asserted propositions must accord with reality, specifying what is, namely, that which is the case. This notion of correspondence between propositions and facts presupposes metaphysical realism, which is the assertion that there is a reality independent of mind that is objective, enduring, and actual. Conformity to facts or agreement with reality is the commonsense view of truth; but this definition already begins to show difficulty when epistemologically we may be begging the question. How can we know, let alone prove, that there exists an independent reality or, more specifically, a certain feature of the external world, when all experience, all knowledge, is mediated by mind? If truth is correspondence to reality, then truth must be only a relational property, because whatever is said to be true stands in relation to something external to itself (i.e., objects, facts). But how do we determine facts, when we believe them to be independent of mind, let alone explain how they correspond to mental states that derive their meaning from their mutual relation in the first place? Here truth is said to exist “out there,” yet it is determined by mutual relata. Here is where the correspondence theory begins to founder.

Within the analytic tradition of philosophy, truth is justified belief based on logical coherence following a formal methodology that clearly sets out propositions, gives precise definitions, and avoids contradictions. Logical truths or analytic judgments may differ from empirical facts that require synthetic judgments based on formal parameters and definitions alone. We see this in Aristotle: “everything that is true must in every respect agree with itself” (Prior Analytics, bk I: 47a5). For Aristotle, who introduced the entire field of inductive and deductive logic to Western civilization, truth mirrors consistency and warranted justification. The coherence theory of truth offers several versions. Beginning with the idealists, truth is considered to be a system that progressively develops toward a fuller completion of knowledge. Truth claims are verified when they are seen to inhere in a system of beliefs that are consistent and harmonious with one another. Alternatively, logicians and philosophers of language focus on how the truth of certain propositions must cohere correctly with other propositions within a system of defined meaning. Like correspondence of propositions to facts, coherence as a standard of correctness is a relational dynamic dependent on the truth of propositions that refer to one another and together form a coherent structure of meaning. This usually entails the epistemological distinction between true and false beliefs, both weighed in terms of their appropriate justifications. But the problem here is that justified beliefs or warranted assertions that are internally coherent can nonetheless be false.

Pragmatic theories of truth focus on the usefulness of beliefs in human affairs. In the American pragmatist tradition, true assumptions or propositional attitudes are those that promote desired outcomes; there is a certain utility, then, in how beliefs govern behavior. Here we are concerned with the psychological motives driving certain actions, where truth is assigned value based on the practical consequences of our beliefs, which are held together and validated by community opinion. Here truth becomes whatever works and brings satisfaction. But just because something is useful or brings about a good result does not mean we should tote it under the banner of truth. True or justified beliefs can readily lead to atrocious acts (e.g., war) that are deleterious to all, just as false beliefs and assertions can lead (perhaps by luck, randomness, or change) to success. Here we run into the same problem posed by the criterion of coherence. That a belief is useful or brings about gratification does not necessarily mean it is true. Here a major criticism is that truth devolves into subjective satisfaction—hardly an adequate criterion of truth. Yet pragmatic approaches can be appealing in a variety of ways. They are often aligned with social norms and customs that govern cultural beliefs, carry moral or practical applications, and conform to the phenomenology or Lebenswelt of individuals or groups identified with certain values or subjective experiences that fly in the face of others.

Within psychoanalysis, pragmatic theories have value and have been adopted by perspectivalists (Orange 1995) and constructivists (Hoffman 1998; Stern 1985) who emphasize context and contingency (Stolorow and Atwood 1992). However, there is always the danger that pragmatic approaches might collapse into a relativism or radical subjectivism that defies an objectivist epistemology. Moreover, the postmodern linguistic turn in contemporary psychoanalysis runs a further risk, for truth is always linguistically determined, and hence is defined by grammatical relativism, semantics, social construction, and environmental determinism belonging to the “discourse of the Other” (Lacan 1960, p. 312). Here objective investigation, empirical science, naturalism, and rational inquiry into the nature of the external world become bankrupt: if everything is relative or rests on a negotiated social consensus, there is no such thing as truth in itself.

While all the theories of truth presented so far pose philosophical problems that continue to be debated and are irresolute, these conundrums do not concern us here. There is no need to resolve these age-old philosophical disputes to show that truth is a pivotal construct for psychoanalysis. In fact, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Charles Hanly (1992) considers the concept of truth the “cornerstone” of every method of theoretical, clinical, and applied psychoanalysis (p. 1). But if this is so, why does truth elude definition, let alone consensus? Hanly wants to reinstate the importance of the modern project of truth for psychoanalysis, but he does not offer his own theory. He does, however, point to the value and pursuit of “self-honesty” in the clinical encounter, in both analysand and analyst; through adherence to this value, he believes, the truth about a patient’s life will eventually be “uncovered” (p. 216).

Psychoanalysis does not ask, What is the isness of truth, namely, its essence? It does not query its essential conditions or properties. It merely adopts a conventional lexicon. We see this in Freud, who, as Hanly (1992) aptly points out, espoused both correspondence and coherence theories of truth in relation to clinical data and theoretical postulates. Freud (1937) was also concerned with the question of constructions in analysis in relation to historical truth, which has led many analysts to disavow the archaeological method (or metaphor) of recovery of the past as the clinical task of psychoanalysis. Instead, there has recently been an emphasis on co-construction, mutuality, intersubjectivity, relationality, and hermeneutical co-creation, ideas allowing for many faces of truth (Spiegel 1985). Conversely, some contemporary analysts have adopted the postmodern abnegation of truth and universals altogether (for a critique, see Mills 2012), a stance whereby the very notion of truth becomes an illusion (Bell 2009). Yet all along the implicit assumption in psychoanalysis has remained, as in the sciences, that our object of inquiry (for us, psychic reality) is “the object whose truth we want to discover” (Loewald 1970, p. 297). Indeed, many analysts contend that there is an immediacy to unconscious truth (Blass 2011) that presents itself in the here-and-now moments of the consulting room.

Most of the discourse on truth in the psychoanalytic literature centers on the clinical encounter. Here we find the classical preoccupation with the accuracy of patients’ memories and disclosures, the correctness and meaningfulness of interpretations (Laufer 1994), the conviction of truth induced by the analyst in the patient (Freud 1937), and the “ideological persuasion” unconsciously foisted on patients by analysts who would have them adopt their own convictions of truth (Avenburg and Guiter 1976). Spence (1982) focuses on the process of narrative versus the question of theoretical and historical truth, a focus that may be said to have dovetailed with the linguistic turn and dyadic systems or field-matrix approaches introduced by the American middle group. Rosenberg and Medini (1978) argue that the psychoanalytic method can get at only partial truths, because truth is always a process of emergence entangled with interpersonal problems of agreement and disagreement. Even Hanly (1992), who provides the most comprehensive exploration of the topic in the psychoanalytic literature, does not provide an answer.

The real dilemma lies, I suggest, in the bifurcation between the universal and the particular, or the one and the many. On the one hand, the search for first principles (especially the quest for universals) has been the preoccupation of metaphysics since antiquity. As Aristotle reminds us, “the principles of eternal things must be always most true” (Metaphysics, bk II(a), 993b25). Does truth exist in itself (as in Platonic forms or systems of propositional logic), or is it created via human relations? Ontologists will likely tell you that if you cannot support a universalist notion of truth, then your theory of truth is a meaningless construct, for it degenerates into relativism or semantics. But perhaps the bifurcation itself is misguided, for here I have emphasized the dichotomy rather than the unity of its poles; nonetheless, this binary tension within philosophy has never been resolved. As Davidson (2004) argues, truth is a concept, not an object. Truth claims are determinations mediated by human agency through the parameters of language. “Does truth exist in itself?” is a meaningless question to linguistic philosophers because it presupposes value existing outside of human consciousness. If truth is viewed as a matter of correctness or warranted assertability, then any such determination would always be made in relation to human language and agreement, despite the fact that false beliefs may be misconstrued as truth. But if truth is “coolly distant from human concerns,” then it will always be independent of human belief and “independent of our existence” (Davidson 2004, p. 1229). So the most we can say is that our knowledge is fallible regarding what we posit to be independent of mind, a norm or criterion of which we will never know. Following this line of reasoning, I would say that truth is not a fact, nor an artifact, of the external world; objects are simply assigned value and qualitative properties mediated through mind and language. This distinction dislocates the question of truth from correspondence with reality to internally and interpersonally mediated transactions. Facts merely are, while truth is a mental property attributed to objects or events.

Toward a Metatheory of Truth

The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while,

on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, in this way it is easy, but the fact that we can have a truth and not the particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it [Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk II(a), 993b1–5].

Here Aristotle highlights the double nature of truth as a community of particulars, which everyone experiences in some way and in some fashion, although by themselves they are incomplete, because they fail to be properly integrated within the larger fabric of a collective body of knowledge. In the Metaphysics Aristotle was attempting to examine the first principles of causation and our knowledge of such “in respect of truth” (bk II(a): 993b30). He intimates that wisdom broaches a supraordinate assembly of knowledge—what used to be attributed to philosophy as a whole before disciplines became sharply divided and compartmentalized into separate academic fields and research institutions. But we can realize elements of truth only as individuals wed to context and contingency, despite an overarching process in the making. Here I am reminded of Edward O. Wilson’s consilient plea (1998) for a fundamental unity of all knowledge that would assimilate, verify, corroborate, and validate disparate fields into an integrated metascience. While this dream may seem lofty, if not grandiose and full of countless difficulties, the pursuit of a unified body of knowledge was exactly the ambition of philosophy.

The meaning of truth is encumbered by its history. There has been a preponderant focus on the binary between realism and idealism, or on the essential and mind-independent qualities of truth as objective fact versus our conceptualization and experience of what we perceive and conceive to be, as well as on the definitional parameters of truth, which has traditionally referred to a static property of a logical proposition. It may not be possible to transcend this burden, however. It is misleading to think of truth as one thing, which is a category mistake; rather, we should conceive of truth as being divided into different kinds or particulars, each of which may belong to a certain class. In other words, particulars may participate in certain forms or categories of truth.

Let me distinguish three categories of truth: (1) the ontology of truth, which has to do with being and essence; (2) the epistemology of truth, which has to do with criteria of knowledge, interpretation, belief, and justification; and (3) the phenomenology of truth, which has to do with how truth appears or manifests. These are distinct discourses, although they overlap and coexist on parallel process levels with various degrees of interdependence operative at any given moment. What is important for the purposes of psychoanalytic observation and applied theory is to define and elucidate the kinds of truth that inhere in a particular category or form. Although the three categories are not exhaustive, and hence stand in need of further reflection and development, they may guide us in offering a descriptive analysis of truth as a metatheory rather than as prescriptive or definitive.

Whether psychoanalysis is concerned with describing an ontological state of affairs (correspondence), determining the logical relations between statements that fit properly within a system of interpretation and knowledge (coherence), or allowing the patient’s unique lived experience to unfold in the (pragmatic) treatment encounter, the analytic task becomes defined by its context and purpose in relation to the various ways truth may appear. For example, the goals of theoretical and applied psychoanalysis may be entirely different from those of clinical theory, methodology, pedagogy, and praxis. As shifting contexts and aims present themselves, so too do questions regarding psychoanalytic truth. Within the context of treatment, the question of truth speaks to a certain psychological revelation and impact it has on the subject, whose unique subjectivity is affected on the most archaic levels regulating unconscious organizing principles. This applies as well to the analyst’s subjectivity and its felt reverberation on the therapeutic dyad. Here practical matters are most important, for truth is ultimately about personal, lived experience (Erlebnis) as self-realization and self-honesty within an intersubjective space that promotes and facilitates this burgeoning process. Here truth may be said to transpire within the broader domains of authenticity, creativity, and valuation that permeate the analytic encounter. In this context, truth may be adjudicated based on its genuineness, openness, frank candor, or brute manifestation in the actual moment (Latin genuinus, natural < Greek geneia, born). Here we should view truth not as an absolute category that discloses itself in its entirety, but rather as a contextual process that reveals itself a bit at a time and from many different perspectives. This is what we witness in the consulting room.

Because there are so many versions of truth that emphasize constructivist, linguistic, semantic, and performative features of speech acts, where assent, consensus, and endorsement of statements determine the strictures of truth, as well as theories we have not even touched upon (e.g., deflationary, minimalist, prosentential, and redundancy perspectives in reference to truth predicates), it would on the face of things appear prudent to endorse a pluralistic theory of truth wherein more than one property can, depending on context, make a proposition true. Here truth is delineated as a functional property that is multiply instantiated (Lynch 2009). By and large, psychoanalysts are not as concerned with these scholarly controversies as they are with practical matters germane to their craft (phronēsis). From this standpoint, a metatheory of truth tailored to particular questions, purposes, and contexts may be the most sensible option on the table. But whatever approach we adopt (itself conditioned on warranted assertability susceptible to fallibility), we must concede that it is always open to flux and dynamic change based on the fact that there will never be a final end of inquiry at which data, ideas, and knowledge are complete, perfectly sufficient, and immune from further revision. This means that truth will always be a relative or contingent matter depending on our definition of adequacy and completeness, which ultimately stands in relation to our penumbral goals, purposes, methodologies, and modes of discourse.

How does a metatheory of truth apply to psychoanalytic theory and clinical process? Can truth coalesce in a conceptual scheme, and/or be signified and revealed through such a scheme? Can the theoretical models of drive, ego, object, self, and intersubjectivity all radiate elements of truth simultaneously despite the varying emphasis analysts place on different facets of psychic reality and clinical praxis? Can we not see gradations of truth in all psychoanalytic discourses? When classical theory postulates an unconscious dominion, or Jungian theory an archetypal objective psyche, or Lacanian theory the Real (the ineffable domain of desire), these truth claims are ontological propositions, just as how we come to know the unconscious, the archetypal, and the real is mediated by various epistemological criteria (empirical, inferential, semiotic, rational) that are revealed as phenomena to both patient and analyst. Each subfield of psychoanalysis has its preferred way of conceptualizing the human condition and the analytic encounter, and some of these conceptions are at odds with one another. Can all of them be correct? Notice here that I have deliberately invoked the traditional correspondence-coherence view of truth when posing this question, the legitimacy of which is in question. Perhaps a better way to frame the issue is to ask, Are they equally germane? The answer to which is yes, each within its own frame of discourse. But what happens when the discourse of one psychoanalytic school clashes with that of another? Does this automatically make one right and the other wrong, or is this an example of how truth presents multiple appearances? It all depends what we are looking for. Those seeking one irrefutable Truth will not find it, as this expectation overlooks the multiplicity of manifestation as emergence. I will attempt to make these points more explicit when I present a clinical example.

Lacan once said that when a patient speaks, he speaks the truth, but never the whole truth. ¹ We can never enunciate the whole truth, for it appears only in partial expressions. Here we may say that truth is harbored unconsciously, or as Aristotle puts it, that “the soul possesses truth” (Nicomachean Ethics, bk VI, 1139b15). The psychoanalyst’s pursuit of truth is that of the soul-searcher, the “psyche-analyst” whose mission is to observe and interpret unconscious phenomenology. And, may I add, to heal suffering whenever possible. I suggest that the quest for truth is most useful as a phenomenological-hermeneutic project, that is, determining how truth appears and how appearance as such is to be interpreted. Truth manifestations are imbued with meaning, value, and explanatory power. But this is an idiosyncratic enterprise, for as Aristotle notes, “the truth is not that what appears exists, but that what appears exists for him to whom it appears, and when, and in the sense in which, and in the way in which it appears” (Metaphysics, bk IV, 1011a20). Here truth involves metacontextual interpretation. Whatever appears must be accompanied by a hermeneutic referent if it is to lend any significance or meaning to appearance; thus, appearance and interpretation are coextensive yet conjoined as a phenomenohermeneutic unit. The quest-ion facing psychoanalytic truth becomes, How do we interpret appearance?

Truth as Unconcealment

Heidegger’s elaboration of the ground and presencing of Being as it is portrayed philosophically can be understood in a very Freudian manner, depending on what aspect of his project you engage. His dual presentation of truth as both revealing and concealing applies to how the analyst understands unconscious communication, resistance, and repression, which is highly congenial with the classical, Kleinian, and ego psychological traditions. Further, the analyst’s task of bringing into the open and uncovering hiddenness from its disguised lair goes to the very heart of psychoanalytic technique.

In Section 44 of Being and Time, Heidegger (1927) discusses the relation between Dasein, disclosedness, and truth. This was the beginning of his later preoccupation with the pre-Socratic notion of ἀλήθεια, which he translates as Unverborgenheit or “unconcealedness.” Truth as aletheia is a form of disclosure, unconcealment, or uncoveredness that reveals itself through that which appears. Heidegger argues that Plato’s and Aristotle’s interpretation of truth as “correctness” distorted its original meaning, and hence his cardinal concern was a proper return to the “first inception” of understanding the iteration of Being.

Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. A-letheia is its reversal, an unforgetting of what previously was hidden. In psychoanalysis the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is the return of the repressed. Heidegger was fastidious in investigating how the truth of being is disclosed or uncovered from its hiddenness. This discourse fits nicely in a psychoanalytic paradigm because we are interested primarily in (1) the act of “uncovering” the unconscious elements of a patient’s subjectivity, and (2) the specific “uncoverings” of what is disclosed, namely, the contents and details of mental objects, memories, fantasies, linkages to past representations, and so on. The notion of truth as unhiddenness also points to a process of how unconscious phenomena unfold and divulge themselves to patient and analyst. Truth can exist only if it is revealed, but for Heidegger what is disclosed or shines forth is something that was already present but hidden. Here we have a fine discourse on unconscious phenomenology.

In Heidegger’s treatment of Phenomenon (§7, A), he is concerned with highlighting the distinct nuances of disclosure that cannot be reduced to a simple uniformity. The English word “truth” is therefore an imposition, as it forces a single categorization on appearance when truth eludes such categorization in its distinct moments. When we refer here to “appearance,” we do not mean “semblance” (Heidegger equates the two meanings), or that which looks like what it is not; rather, we mean “that which shows itself in itself, the manifest” (p. 51). When Heidegger begins unpacking the meaning of phainomenon (φαιvόµεvov) as the manifest, or that which shows itself, we immediately begin to see how convoluted the concept of truth becomes. Heidegger speaks of the double entendre of appearance as something that announces itself, and in this sense is showing itself, but this showing is merely semblance—hence not a true showing itself, which makes it nonmanifest. Therefore, what is taken as the manifest could be merely a veil. What is behind the veil is the task of psychoanalytic inquiry. But in order not to further muddle our conventional discourse, phenomenon and appearance should, for our purposes here, be viewed as equivalent constructs.

Heidegger’s reintroduction of the ancient concept of truth has many nuances bearing directly on the suppleness of psychoanalytic observation and interpretive technique. For example, to “disclose” is to open or reverse a closure; to “reveal” is to remove the veil; and to “discover” is to undo the act of covering. These subtle processes expose the fine distinctions in how mental functioning operates on the way ego processes allow certain material to enter consciousness while other material is barred (an operation to be differentiated from the speech utterances of free association and the enunciation of that material, which may or may not be met with censorship or resistance), and on the defensive and transferential processes operative intrapsychically and within the analytic dyad. But we may ask, What does it mean for something to show itself? A slip, an unintentional act or utterance, forgetfulness, a bungled action—are these not disclosures or revelations of a peculiar kind? Spontaneous gestures reveal a truth. Psychoanalysis generally presupposes that there are meaningful communications (as disclosures) transmitted through these events. The event itself is the manifest. How we come to interpret its signification is another matter.

When Heidegger discusses the concept of logos (λόγος) and truth (ἀλήθεια) (see §7, B), he tells us that “discourse” as logos “lets something be seen” by making it manifest and accessible to another party. ² The character of speaking authentically, in particular, reveals a certain truth to be made manifest, and hence “seen as something,” which is taken out of its “hiddenness” (p. 56). The “Being-true” of logos is therefore made manifest or seen as the unhidden (ἀληθές), which must be discovered or uncovered (entdeckt). That which is seen is that which is unconcealed; however, it may need to be looked for because it can escape notice, as our perceptions are not always sufficiently attuned to what is disclosed. This is in contrast to “Being-false,” which is an act of deceiving or of covering up (verdecken) something so it cannot be seen, as by deliberate obstruction (placing one thing in front of another so it cannot be seen: a defense), or of concealment.

We can readily see how the ancient conception of truth can apply to the consulting room. The notion of truth as discovery (contra construction) is the immediate presentation of a something, what Hegel (1807) refers to as “sense certainty,” of a showing itself—that which is unveiled—the naked truth. Here truth is a presencing of particularized being, a self-revealing of itself. Picture the process of free association as the analysand speaks whatever comes to mind: each utterance, or its omission, signifies an unconscious communication as well as a meaning. So does silence. The trick (elusive and difficult as it may be) is in understanding the nuances and discrepancies within the contextual moment in which truth may be released, partly breached, or foreclosed altogether. Of course in practice free association is fraught with internal resistances, denial, refutations, censorship, interpersonal reservations, and countertransference enactments that stymie or occlude the pure self-revealing of intrapsychic phenomena. This intricate dynamic typifies the overdetermined defensive nature of mental processes, which reflects an inherent split in agency that is divided in its purposes and revelatory confessions, hence falling under the rubric of compromise formation and felt intrusions (fantasized or real) from the analyst/other. Yet the mere mobilization of resistive and reactive internal pressures from the analysand points to the presence of agentic forces designed to guard against the disclosure of certain truths it finds threatening, while securing a clearing for others to manifest as unconcealment.

Although analysts all work differently, in our therapeutic work we often listen to the manifest content, the themes, the derivatives, and emotional valences, thus waiting patiently for latent material and past patterns to resurface, when, spontaneously, we sense the incongruity, feel the discontinuity, observe the slip, hear the broken utterance, the pause, the silence, the confusion, the patient’s self-conscious hesitancy, lack of clarity, and so on. Faulty achievements (Fehlleistungen) are the revelation of unconscious phenomena, the conveyance of buried truths. The slip that breaches the gap into consciousness reveals its unconscious essence: that which appears is freed from its concealment, even if unintentionally or by accident. For Freud, the ontology of unconscious truth is epitomized by the occurrence of dreams, parapraxes, and symptoms: like the dream’s navel, der Nabel des Traums (Freud 1900, p. 525)—a convoluted mass of condensation and displacement—truth remains at once exposed yet interred. Unconscious truth is partially disclosed in these moments, and it is not merely a matter of constructing their significance or interpreting a resistance. Of course metatruths are operative here, as the analyst engages in a parallel process of one’s own in relation to the intersubjective system itself. Contra the notion of construction and reconstruction in analysis, here truth does not consist in making something out of that which appears, such as the co-creation of meaning in the therapeutic dyad (though that could later become a locus of logos, a hermeneutic framing by revisiting that which previously manifested). The point I wish to emphasize here is that truth prereflexively presents itself as itself: it is not assigned or co-constructed; rather, it is disclosed as self-disclosure, the self-showing of phenomena. Here the interpretation of meaning becomes a second-order structuring or emergent property of its original manifestation.

Heidegger’s apophantical (predicate) discourse, which is derived from Husserl, ³ is concerned primarily with a secondary form of disclosing—namely, talk—but he wants to trace its original union to the “letting-show-self” of phenomena, or “to-the-things themselves.” How would this look to the psychoanalyst? Despite the fact that Heidegger rejected the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, ⁴ his preoccupation with discovering truth within the recalcitrant realm of that which lies hidden speaks to an unconscious ontology of being in which its purpose (telos) is to show itself. ⁵ There are several distinct moves or activities in which this can occur: (1) the act of opening, or making-to-open, whereby we may investigate a state of openedness (Erschlossenheit)—ultimately for Heidegger this is Dasein, ⁶ the extant human being in the world; (2) opening up into openness (Offenheit), which prepares a spacing or establishes a clearing for a disclosure, one that may appear or have the potential to appear; and, finally, (3) disclosedness itself, that which shines forth as self-showing. At this stage, there is a determinate quality to what manifests. That which has become open is the object of our investigation, and that which is disclosed is the product of its self-manifestation. This implies some form of agency at work. Here it may not be inappropriate to make a comparison between the unconscious agentic act of preparing a psychic space for openness (as we do in treatment, or while free associating, or during the course of recollection or working through, etc.), where a clearing or region for openness is pruned away and becomes host to a sea of potential objects to be made manifest, objects specifically made determinate (e.g., memories, images, desires, affects): hence, that which is concretely disclosed.

Being in the open is where revealedness (Offenbarkeit) occurs. This may metaphorically signify the consulting room, or psychic reality, or the analytic discourse. And what is the condition or agent of therapeutic action? It is the creation of a psychological atmosphere in which the clearing can occur. To me it seems essential that nurturing the ground—as well as tending to the garden—for a clearing to take place determines when and what will reveal itself. This could be the genuine article, or a covering over of that article with a facade, itself a form of disclosedness, yet one that keeps the original artifact hidden. From this standpoint, whatever manifests is a disclosure. One may quibble over the authenticity of the disclosure, saying it is “not really truth” because the repressed object remains hidden, or the censor barrier has prevented a further revealing, or the defense overshadows the original wish, or the conscious ego has dismissed the disclosure or resisted the interpretation, and so on, but this does not negate the fact that psychic phenomena are potentially infinite. If we look at truth only from the vantage point of a correspondent state of affairs, or consensual assent to propositions or facts, or warranted assertability as justified belief, then we miss the point (and hence the manifestation) because we are reverting to a discourse on “correctness.” Is there any such thing as a “correct” defense, or are they merely revelations (revealings) as unconscious articulation?

The unconscious speaks the truth, but not the whole truth at once. What remains hidden can be revealed, only then to be covered over by another articulation, or covered up entirely as a reburial, a return to the grave of repression. One enactment may serve to promote a false truth, which is a disguise or persona, in order to cover over or reconceal an earlier appearance; but there is an unconscious intention in this act of negation, the intention to present another appearance that promotes a false presence, yet one that is nevertheless revealed. Here the lie is present although it may remain hidden, perhaps even concealed from itself as self-deception. We are not aware of our self-deception because one who is in possession of the truth or genuine knowledge is aware that one is lying by concealing a certain truism, as Sartre (1943) famously pointed out. An unconscious manifestation, to the contrary, is the revelation of a lie to oneself that has been opened.

And what is the role of the analyst? On the one hand, the analyst is an opener, for the analytic encounter sets the stage for preparing a proper clearing for psychic exploration. But I would suggest that this role is privileged primarily by the subject who discloses, because it is the agent behind the role that allows an opening, not just the material that is disclosed; yet the process of opening is mutually implicative in the analytic relationship. On the other hand, the analyst is a dis-coverer, as the work of uncovering is facilitated by the carefully fostered and organic ambience of the therapeutic relationship. Perhaps the analyst is the first to witness the manifest as it surfaces, especially as the patient acquires education in introspection and self-observation through the analytic method. In fact, Heidegger (1927) specifically refers to the logos transpiring in the speech act between interlocutors as the space where signification is acquired “in its relation to something in its ‘relatedness’” (p. 58). Here “interpretation” unfolds within a “relationship” in which potential multiple meanings surface from a clearing based on a certain setting forth, exhibiting, laying out, recounting, and so forth, that transparently applies to the clinical encounter.

Clinical Illustration

There are countless examples from clinical experience that any analyst can draw on to illustrate the power of unconscious disclosedness as the revelation of hidden truth. Here I present a fragment of a session from a patient who was about one year into his six-year analytic treatment. Rather than focus on the historical dynamics of his case and his developmental traumas, I will for concision present the following interchange as the patient associated from the couch. A central theme in the patient’s life at this time was his inability to see women as loving, nurturing subjects, as well as sexual beings, roles he tended to compartmentalize and keep unintegrated rather than form an holistic metarepresentation. Before entering analysis, he had made a suicide attempt following a breakup with a “sexually aggressive” woman he both desired and was repulsed by. That had led him to reactively seek meeker, “safer” women who were nonthreatening but “boring” and “plain.” He had just begun dating a new girlfriend at the time of the session to be reported, and just immediately before this exchange we were discussing the “lines” between love and sex that he felt were “blurred” in his mind:

Whether you interpret this clinical phenomenon from the standpoint of repression and oedipalization, dissociation and relational trauma, and forgotten sexual abuse or as a mixture of symptom formation, fantasy, and retrieved memory, what is important to emphasize is the spontaneous process of resurfacing of a truth that had remained consciously absent yet unconsciously present until now. In fact, there are myriad truths that can be unpacked from this narrative, the most dominant of which spoke for the subject. It may further be suggested that the analytic milieu facilitated a psychic clearing that allowed a certain opening in the patient’s mind, one that enabled a specific dis-covering (unveiling) to naturally ensue whereby the particularized truth was revealed as mnemonic linkages were recovered.

Unconscious productions that expose themselves through psychic appearances take on innumerable forms, many of them prereflectively instituted—that is, unintentionally disclosed. In this clinical example, truth instituted itself, which obliged further truths to be explored and analyzed, as others were re-veiled. But a certain problematic arises when we view the truth of phenomena as merely prereflexive or, in other words, as tautologically self-instantiating. I am reminded here of Fichte’s absolute self (1794) that posits or asserts (hence thinks) itself into existence. This is untenable without taking into account a material (embodied) foundation or corporeality within which mind emerges. We must account for an original ground for any phenomenon to appear. If phenomena are a pure self-showing, then an endless universe of truths exist as that which spontaneously self-manifests. But why should we grant the status of truth to that which manifests? Quite plainly, because whatever exists is true. Yet we have already determined that predication necessarily makes truth contingent on the relativity of perspective and the relationality of signification based on apophansis. Here we need to reflect on the circumstances that make such determinations possible. The propositional acts of relativity and relationality must emanate from an essential ontology, that which conditions all phenomena. In other words, we cannot speak of the manifest until we address the ground that makes the manifest possible. In order for there to be appearance at all, it must derive from an original, a priori ground.

That which manifests is actual; whatever exists is true. But what happens when truth presents as truth when it is merely semblance, or recedes into the underworld of its original hiddenness once it has revealed itself? Once again, this implies an agentic factor at play. And here Heidegger could not elude the spectre of the dialectic. In “On the Essence of Truth” Heidegger (1930) continued his analysis of revealed being as transpiring within a clearing that opens a space for unconcealment. As each space reveals the potential for truth to appear as phenomena, there is conversely a closing, in that truth may be revealed only in the wake of concealment. This movement of uncovering in the presence of covering underlies the dialectical organization of truth. ⁷

The Dialectics of Truth

As Heidegger elucidates, discourse, or talk (ἀπόφαυσις), is the fulcrum allowing the logos of truth to be disclosed. Truth “proceeds out from” the very thing we are talking about, for truth is a self-showing articulation. Here we are interested in the phenomenology of truth, and hence its process and means of appearance, not necessarily how we know. Yet the two issues are inseparable because the determination of truth is always a hermeneutic enterprise, for truth is conditioned by discourse. This process is not unlike the analytic method, for phenomena show themselves through monologue during free association, as well as through dialogical exchange. Truth ensues from talk; in effect, it speaks for itself. ⁸ Here I am reminded of patients who, after a lengthy flow of speaking out loud their internal chain of thoughts, discover something known but forgotten, something previously hidden but now exposed. We should not be surprised when our patients say “I knew that all along!” for the unconscious speaks a dialectical language. Whether truth is disclosed as revealed repression or as formulated dis-sociative experience, other psychic processes are at the same time dialectically operative, such as ancillary reactions of covering over the bare phenomenon, or the subsequent barring of further material from entering consciousness, it thereby remaining cloaked, as uncovering leads to re-covering. Here the dialectics of truth tell a saga of the concealed unforgotten.

When Freud instituted the fundamental rule as a pledge to honesty, he observed truth as the inverse of honesty, as the radical (albeit genuine) rejection of the imposition itself. Conventional discourse bids us not to be fully honest, not to say whatever we think without censoring it: these defenses are socially conditioned from childhood. Thus, to betray the self-preservative element of defense is not natural. That is why it is only by accident, by the unintentional slip or faulty achievement (Fehlleistung), that truth is revealed. The ethic of honesty during free association is met with an innate tendency toward self-censorship (i.e., resisting awareness of the surfacing material, negating the significance of certain verbalizations or the analyst’s queries or interpretations, and so forth); or with a covering over (such as disavowal, undoing, minimization, reversal) in the winnowing of unconcealedness. For every surfacing there is a countermeasure, and for every burying-over there is a later resurfacing. And what is buried over may remain undiscovered, or it can be re-excavated. What arises may return. This is what Heidegger meant when he referred to the binary of covering up in the shadow of uncovering. Yet, as I have described it so far, this is a simple dialectical repetition of the reiteration of oppositions.

For Heidegger (1927), the uncoveredness of truth is Dasein “there” in its existential constituency as its elemental state of Being. We are born into a world already constituted yet always in a process of becoming. In Heidegger’s words, “Dasein’s disclosedness is the most primordial phenomenon of truth attained” (§44, (b), p. 263). And like unconscious order, this is not transparent. We exist in a world and alongside other entities in the world, and within our own internal world and for our own relatedness to self and others equiprimordially with and through the world that is always temporally transmuting, and hence shifting the field and figure-ground of our perspectives. This is why Heidegger insists that the structure of our disclosedness lies hidden. But what he fails to say or accept is that our primordial structure is unconsciously constituted. Our most basic constitution of Being-there as phenomena is the essence of truth because Dasein is its disclosure and is “in the truth.” ⁹ This is an ontological claim, not merely an epistemological determination, as some proponents of truth wish to have it. In other words, truth is real but elusive: disclosedness is “factical” yet abstruse.

What is not specifically addressed by Heidegger, but implicit all along in his treatment of Dasein, is the unconscious manifestations of disclosedness. We are thrown into existence: this is part of our historicity and is an objective empirical fact. Those who wish to dismiss salient realism are misguided, for the pre-phenomenological presence of the past is an ontological principle already constitutive of the human being. Elsewhere I have referred to this as archaic primacy (Mills 2010), for the past metaphysically conditions the present and the future despite the fact that it may not determine the developmental path or vicissitudes of the experiential subject. Our thrownness presupposes an unconscious ontology because it is the original ground of Being, a ground without a ground (Ungrund) that conditions the potential for disclosure, openness, and that which is opened, as well as what is concealed, covered over, and returned to the antediluvian origins of its unconscious abyss (Mills 2002).

Heidegger elevates the disclosive property of “projection” as the human subject’s Being-toward its potentiality and future possibilities. Here Dasein is a bid for freedom and expression of its “ownmost Being-for-Self.” And this is what differentiates truth as the subject’s pursuit of authenticity versus its existential tendency to fall into inauthenticity or falseness. This is where Heidegger institutes the dialectical necessity of the polarity of movement that Dasein is destined to enact. All human beings vacillate between authentic and inauthentic modes of being, which are ontologically given as a formal condition of the truth of Dasein’s disclosedness. In actuality (not merely abstraction), it is Dasein in its authentic modes of comporting, relating, and disclosing that differentiates its transcendental moments from its ordinary, corrupt, and pathological ways of being in the world as a falsehood (Mills 1997). What is pivotal in any substantive discussion of Dasein’s falseness is the presence and ubiquity of our pathos (πάθος), a necessary (though insufficient) unconscious condition of what it means to be human. Heidegger refers to this condition as our fallenness, our proclivity to lapse into lassitude, to close off and cover up, to hide and disguise, to listen to “the they” and accept gossip, idle curiosity, ambiguity, and fiction as truth. To be human is to suffer, and this indisputable truism is part of the dialectical manifestations of Dasein’s process of unconcealment in the act of concealment. The dialectical structure of being human is to be both in truth within untruth, its double face. ¹⁰

Truth always resurfaces; the unconscious always reveals itself, usually in cryptic and circuitous ways. Analyses of these resurfacings point toward aletheia, or in Heidegger’s words, “the opening of presence” (1966, p. 390), the light of Being. This is what I take to be the project of psychoanalysis, to be continuously open to the light of what is presented from the shadowed netherworld. Despite the fact that in 1927 Heidegger reintroduced philosophy to the question of truth by revisiting the ancients, which with his enunciation of the truth of Being became a lifelong preoccupation, he failed to appreciate that unconcealment as the manifest is the instantiation of unconscious self-revelation. What this means is that unconscious agency is an a priori organization that reveals itself through the manifestations of consciousness. In other words, the unconscious is the house of Being.

The dialectics of truth (as the simultaneous process of disclosedness and hiddenness) dovetails nicely with a psychoanalytic framework of unconscious motivation and defense. A fundamental tenet of psychoanalysis is that mental agencies are interactive, expressive, and communicative, and transpire in tandem with one another governed by an unconscious nucleus under the influence of psychic determinism. These forces in the mind are born of compromise and are mutually implicative, all clamoring for release of the life within. There are fundamental divisions, splittings, and oppositions that characterize the interpsychic fabrics and interpersonal relations that transpire within and between separate subjects, just as transference and countertransference are mutually operative at any given moment in the analytic environment, let alone our general orientation to the world at large.

The dialectics of consciousness and unconsciousness, wish and defense, the pleasure principle vs. reality, desire and prohibition, primary vs. secondary process thinking, awareness and repression, and the inter-constellations of drive, ego, object, self, and intersubjectivity all speak to the dialectics of truth from their own standpoint. Whether we evoke the trinity of It, I, and superego, imaginary, symbolic, and real, or embodiment, affect, and cognition; the dynamics of projective identification, where splitting, projection, and introjection form a reciprocal dialectical pattern; the perpetual compromise functions, formations, and substitutions fashioned through internal conflict; or the relationship between inner and outer, self and other, the selfobject milieu, and the interpersonal system itself—all are conditioned on unconscious motivations and their ensuing consequences. From drive to dissociation, wish and relationality, the intrapsychic to the intersubjective, all modes of psychic activity are dependent on the contingencies of unconscious process, the central activities of which form the ground of psychic reality. Thus, the dialectics of disclosedness and concealment become the edifice of psychoanalytic theory.

CODA

The concept of truth is relevant to every intellectual discipline in the history of ideas, yet it remains elusive and enigmatic. In some discourses we are accustomed to think of truth as the semiotic signification of universality and finality, a category of the ultimate. In others, truth is foreclosed, subjective, or purported not to exist. The very word imports an act of hubris—a proclamation of grandiosity, a definitive statement about the real. Yet this final, absolute signification stamped in the meaning of the word has acquired sundry meanings and interpretations peculiar to various schools of philosophy, not to mention the common man. The notion of truth has many potential meanings all at once, from the universal to the particular, the private to the social. We may historically observe theories of truth centering on correspondence to reality or factual events; logical coherence; epistemological sincerity and justified belief; empirical verifiability; linguistic determinism; social constructivism; pragmatic utility; relativism; and an unfolding supraordinate process or complex holism. Truth has also been elevated to the ontological status of virtue—the striving of pure reason and science, the noble good, the ideal or sublime object of knowledge, and hence the property of the enlightened mind.

In revisiting the ancient notion of aletheia as disclosedness or unconcealment, we have discovered a psychoanalytic contribution to truth conditioned on an unconscious ontology responsible for the simultaneous acts of revealing and concealing. The dialectics of truth allow for distinct categories and instantiations to emerge as metacontextual appearance, which may be said to constitute a general metatheory of truth. The question of truth may be seen as most useful if conceived as a phenomenohermeneutic project, yet one that participates in an overall process of being-in-becoming, which conditions the fount of appearances that spring from its essential ontological structure. As the house of Being, the dynamic unconscious provides a logical model for the ground and explication of psychic appearances as such.

Truth lies in the endless manifestation of appearances that in themselves shine forth as authentic phenomena (insofar as they simply happen), but by themselves they are only micro-units of a greater totality or unfolding process of becoming that reveals itself as momentary intercessions. Here truth becomes an encompassing principle, which can be revealed only as a plethora of appearances, for its holistic structure cannot all appear at once. Therefore truth is a logical category of unity and inclusion, but its distinct appearances never disclose its wholeness. This will ensure that any appearance of truth will always remain half-hidden, behind the back of truth, so to speak. Perhaps this partial hiddenness metaphorically represents the privileges of the abyss, for the concealed and undisclosed forms of being that are imperceptible yet always present may be said to properly belong to an unconscious agency, yet one that allows for multiple appearances within the broader ontological configurations that constitute psychic reality. The unconscious is continually self-concealing as it is revealing, traversing the openings it generates for itself as it retreats into its closings within its underworld. And here we have a genuine psychoanalytic theory of truth.