Epistemology,Power,Discourse,Truth and Groups

Introduction

Some three years ago I was approached to write a review (2014) of a new, yet to be published book for Australian psychoanalytic psychotherapists. That book was From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis: The Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow (2013) and the main editor was Edi Pertegato, an Italian group and individual analyst. Pertegato (1999) had described Burrow as an ‘Illustrious unknown man’.

This would have been an interesting task in itself and might have been left at that. However, members of a reading and discussion group convened in Melbourne under the auspices of the Australian Association of Group Psychotherapists became participants in an exploration of this work. Along the way I learnt that the book had been received with interest overseas and was controversial in that it sought to turn on the head some old and familiar and even precious beliefs that hitherto had remained unquestioned. It sought to turn some aspects of what had previously been called truth into myth and even falsehood.

I came to consider that this whole matter of what had been claimed as suppressed and ignored intellectual endeavour which, to use Pertegato’s term, had involved a ‘ransacking’ would not be unique. Also I came to see that for many years I had an interest in power and its varieties of expression in society both historically and in contemporary life whether via politics, economics, relational life, intellectual pursuits, science, sport or whatever. I was preoccupied with the relationship between power and knowledge in all its varieties of expression especially in intellectual life.

The introductory essay in Pertegato’s book is important as it describes the background, including the historical context and the significance of the works by Burrow who lived from 1875 to 1950. This book deals with those works spanning from 1913 to 1930 but Burrow’s writing continued thereafter and included seven books, letters and 70 articles. The significance of Burrow’s works includes the fact that in the main he wrote the articles, in both English and German, in the United States, contemporaneously with the work of Sigmund Freud, of which Burrow was fully aware. Burrow was the first (co-) President of the American Psychoanalytic Association after founding it in 1911 (with Ernest Jones and others). Further, it is argued, that his writing anticipated by many years certain ideas whose genesis is usually attributed to Europeans in the field of group analysis.

For the benefit of those that have not read either the book itself or a review I will summarize something of the thesis of the introductory essay.

Burrow attended the famous five lectures by Freud at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909, met Freud and decided to relocate to Europe and seek analysis with Carl Jung. Quite early Burrow came to consider that Freud’s approach did not sufficiently emphasize social influences. Ultimately, Freud and his close colleagues marginalized Burrow who went on to pioneer many significant developments in psychoanalysis, later moving from orthodox psychoanalysis to what he termed group analysis. His articles were barred from publication in the mainstream analytic journals from about 1925 it seems as a result of collusion. There is no doubt, for example, that Burrow coined the terms ‘matrix’, ‘group analysis’ and the ‘social unconscious’ which are key terms in the field of analytic group work previously claimed as discoveries by S.H. Foulkes. However, some would no doubt challenge how these terms in their first use related to the Foulkesian ones. Of course he may not have given them the precise meanings they came to possess decades later. In the 1920s he began conducting groups analytically and published many articles. In the 1960s Nathan Ackerman, a renowned analytic family therapist, wrote of how Burrow’s works were plagiarized with little or no attribution. According to Pertegato, Burrow’s writing prefigured later theorists in framing ‘a revolutionary theory that postulates a well defined shift from drive to relationship . . .’ In 1913 he wrote an article entitled Psychoanalysis and Life (1913) emphasizing the importance of the primary union of mother and baby at a time when psychoanalytic emphasis was on the drive theory. Malcolm Pines (2013), a renowned London group analyst and psychoanalyst has written that Burrow anticipated some of the later ideas expounded by Balint, Klein, Bowlby, Winnicott, Lacan, Schilder, Kohut and Mahler.

So at the heart of the editor’s thesis is that a more or less coherent set of ideas and practices were established by Burrow in the early part of the 20th-century only to be dealt with by the dominant analytic establishment with a degree of disdain and rejection. Further, that these self-same ideas were later given oxygen by individuals and groups but claimed as their own discoveries or creations with little or no attribution. The editors to my mind make a good case for their theses but I was stimulated to go further and ask myself ‘What was going on?’ Are the terms ‘censorship, plagiarism, misappropriation and ransacking’ the only ways of understanding these phenomena? How unique or not are these sorts of phenomena and are they confined to the world of psychoanalysis? Readers, of course, can develop their own answers to these and other questions that flow from a consideration of these matters.

The Work of Michel Foucault

Most readers will be familiar with the name Foucault and many will be familiar with his works but there is value in deconstructing matters for others. Foucault was a Frenchman and a student of philosophy and sociology in France during the turbulent times of the 1960s. His work spanned more than two decades and has been very influential if at times only to be reacted against or opposed. Nevertheless he introduced some ideas fundamental to the consideration of what he termed the power-knowledge duality, implying that knowledge only exists in relation to power.

And in relation to these matters it is worth recalling that Stoll (1972) is credited with writing ‘Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom’.

Madness and Civilization (1965), published in French in 1961, was at first an historical account of the development of ways the state used to manage mental illness in the French context. Through such studies Foucault came to consider that the location of power in individuals and the disciplines they constituted provided them with formidable influence also becoming evident in the figure of the doctor and the scientist. He documented the ways that the insane were understood which dictated management e.g. Pinel (1796). This seemed to include a movement from such people just inhabiting their communities perhaps as strange or eccentric individuals to incarceration with criminals and later asylums. Often, nevertheless, the treatment was cruel and we would say misguided nowadays. But misguided treatments continue today.

Of far more significance than an historical account was his documentation over several years and via a number of publications on how a society or a state at any point in time is subject to a complex interplay of political, social, economic, intellectual and other influences. There is in this the matter of context. Perhaps his work in the area of epistemology, the study of knowledge, climaxes in his writing of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), which is a complex treatise ultimately drawing together power, knowledge and truth and is what we could call a contribution to the history of ideas. This developed in such a way that what is determined as knowledge is directly reflective of those aforementioned forces (political, social, economic, intellectual etc.) and their interplay. Crucial to his thesis was the view that power—in the case of the power that psychiatry at the time—science—and what he termed the political economy and others, gained, as a result of such interplay. His ideas include the commentary that at the end of the 18th-century and into the 19th-century the population of European states came to be contained, examined, measured, and assessed via what he called surveillance measures or institutions such as the army, schools etc. and termed this ‘carceration’. He was critical of psychiatry in essence for falsely developing itself as a science with claims to understanding insanity when no such understanding existed. Incidentally, he did, at least early on his writings, offer some praise of the later Freud for focussing more on language as opposed to positivism. Positivism is a term referring to the 19th-century interest in the rational and the logical or what we might now call a version of evidence-based interventions. But he was also critical of psychoanalysis, for one thing it coming to lodge power in the institution of psychoanalysis, in a similar way to how the medical doctor became and remains a very powerful figure and institution today.

The Lysenko Story (2008) is a case that demonstrates Foucault’s ideas around power, knowledge and truth and one to which he referred. Lysenko was a Soviet Agronomist from the Ukraine who carried out experimental research to improve the yield of grain crops and became very popular with Stalin in the 1930s into the 1950s. He had a peasant background and had relatively little formal academic education. During these times the forced collectivization of the nation resulted in famines and great hardship. He developed a successful process to make wheat more fertile in winter which involved chilling the seeds of winter cereals so they grew like spring crops. He claimed that this altered state of the grain could be inherited and was a proponent of Lamarckian ideas as opposed to Darwinism. He developed anti-Mendelian views on genetics and was given considerable power by Stalin. Dissent from his theories was outlawed in 1948. Politically he became useful in forcing peasants back onto farms at a time when they were deserting and causing major political problems. His theories were not discredited by the government until the late 1960s. Before that time it is considered that he did profound harm to the development of science in the Soviet Union. Ultimately he was publicly discredited by physicist Andrei Sakharov and subsequently all of his ideas were debunked. Some view the influence of Lysenko and his regressive scientific beliefs given expression and power by Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as causing the collapse of the Soviet regime because of their failure to be able to provide sufficient grain for the masses and clinging to anachronistic theories. It seems that in a similar vein Stalin ordered his nuclear scientists to avoid using Einsteinian equations in working on the development of the atom bomb for non-scientific reasons!

This story demonstrates how Foucault viewed the interplay of political, economic and social factors that have influenced how science and for example psychiatry and other disciplines came to be powerful. Psychiatry was one of what he called the ‘dubious sciences’. He described how medicine, biology, and other sciences are linked to social structures and that it is not simply a matter of scientific facts being ‘discovered’ through effort or serendipity. Towards the end of the 18th-century and beyond what he termed a new discourse developed allowing a whole new regime in discourse and forms of knowledge to be applied. His view was that what I term the interplay of influences in a state allowed a discourse to develop and take root for a time. According to Wikipedia ¹ the term discourse is used in different ways. It can mean a generalization of the concept of conversation. It can also mean the totality of codified language or vocabulary used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and social practice such as the medical discourse. And in the field of linguistics and the work of Michel Foucault and his followers it describes ‘an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are enouncements’. An enouncement (an anglicized French word) is an abstract construct that allows signs to communicate specific relations between and among objects, subjects and statements. So a discourse in Foucault’s terms is composed of symbolic sequences between and among objects, subjects and statements. The term ‘discursive formation’ describes how written and spoken communications produce such a discourse. So historical, political, economic, cultural, linguistic etc. influences can allow a specific discourse or conversation to develop or not develop.

Foucault defines a ‘discursive formation’ as an historically situated field of knowledge. His view is that knowledge is dispersed across an entire field and not located in particular statements or groups of statements. So at any time knowledge may occupy a nodal position that is determined by the historically situated field of knowledge or discursive formation. In other words there is a dynamic of knowledge. He said that: ‘statements can be dismissed (or never even considered) not because they are thought to be false, but because it is not clear what it would amount to for them to be either true or false’ (1994: 93).

Foucault’s ideas whilst being highly influential also encountered opposition. Two critics who took such a direction were Charles Taylor (1984) and Richard Rorty (1985). Their arguments stemmed from the view that in opposing the validity of knowledge and truth at any particular time he introduced himself a form of power that neutralized or substituted one form of power for another. Also, it was argued, that his theses offered no hope or way forward.

Foucault contrasted his ideas with those of Thomas Kuhn (1962), also writing in the 1960s, who coined the term ‘paradigm shift’. This term denoted a revolutionary change in the basic assumptions or paradigms within a science. An example would be the theory of relativity or quantum physics. Foucault suggested that socially unconscious influences can operate to bring about new knowledge. Kuhn, Foucault said, was talking about a number of scientists consciously agreeing that a new direction entirely was appropriate.

Links with the Social Unconscious

A number of group analysts have been exploring the concept of the social unconscious as opposed to the individual unconscious you will be familiar with from orthodox psychoanalysis. It is a term invented by Burrow but like others has been laid claim to by several others either by themselves or their protagonists. In recent years the term has been developed by Dennis Brown, Farhad Dalal (1998), a past Melbourne Freud Conference lecturer, Earl Hopper, Haim Weinberg (Hopper and Weinberg, 2011), and Vamik Volkan, also a past Freud Conference lecturer, amongst others. A definition that may be of general acceptance might be:

the social unconscious refers to the existence of restraints and constraints of social, cultural and communication arrangements of which people are ‘unaware’ to varying degrees. It includes anxieties, fantasies, myths, defences and object relations, as well as various aspects of socio-cultural-economic-political factors and forces, many of which are also co-constructed unconsciously by the members of particular groupings. (Weinberg and Raufman, 2014)

Now the use of the term ‘unaware’ is of course a reference to the unconscious but as is also the case with the individual unconscious it is referring to the different categories of unconscious such as the biological based unconscious, the non-conscious, the unconscious as a reservoir of the repressed, the Jungian collective unconscious and more.

Dennis Brown (2001) wrote of the collective assumptions that a social system develops which includes social defences (as opposed to individual defences), disavowals and structural oppression inherent in a society. Others emphasize how anxieties, fantasies, myths and memories are part of the social unconscious.

As with most aspects of any body of theory there are different perspectives and emphases according to the spokesperson. One aspect that has been of interest has been the discovery of mirror neurons by Di Pellegrino et al. (1992) in the pre-motor cortex and other areas of the brain. Mirror neurons are stimulated when an organism carries out an action and also when another organism observes such an action. This has been claimed as further evidence of the biologically and instinctually based social and group nature of the human species.

Vamik Volkan (2001) described how social and cultural groups share ‘chosen glories and traumas’. He used the term ‘time collapse’ to describe how an event in the present can come to re-ignite old and even ancient cultural and national wounds. He also described how traumatic events are passed on trans-generationally and continue to evoke whole masses to experience certain psychological phenomena. This is rather like the familiar passing of psychopathology from parent to child at an unconscious level. Let us recall here the land-mark article by Selma Fraiberg, Ghosts in the Nursery (1975). One well-known example at the social level would be the Holocaust. Volkan described how the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic exploited politically an anniversary (June 28, 1989) of the battle of Kosovo that originally occurred on June 28, 1389. Readers may familiarize themselves with this scholarship for further details.

In a sense the social unconscious is a link with Foucault’s theories that influences are operating at a subliminal level in a state or social group that determine what becomes deemed as knowledge or can be considered truth.

Power, Truth and Authenticity

Foucault described a politics of truth in societies. As Faubion elaborated Foucault considered that at any time in history there is a battle for truth:

. . . it being said once again that by truth I mean not ‘the ensemble of truths to be discovered and accepted’ but, rather, ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true . . . (Faubion, 1994: 132)

So again power, knowledge and truth come to be politically related and we can see this as Foucault reminds us of the power that Oppenheimer developed in the middle of the 20th-century in being a nuclear physicist who was responsible for the invention of the atomic bomb, and came to be feted by the US administration, later to be hounded by the McCarthyist discourse.

According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2002) the definitions of key words such as truth, sincerity, authenticity have evolved. Truth originally meant being steadfast in allegiance, loyalty and being virtuous, in Old English terms a reference to loyalty to the nobility, I expect; later coming to mean an established principle and ultimately referring to the real thing as distinguished from a representation or imitation. Sincerity seems to emphasize a lack of pretence or hypocrisy and being straightforward. Authenticity refers to authority, legal validity, trustworthiness, being real and original. One can see that there are only subtle differences between the terms but a contribution from Lionel Trilling suggested there was a distinction to make: ‘Sincerity requires us to act and really be the way we present ourselves. Authenticity on the other hand is about locating and expressing our true inner self and assessing relationships by these means’ (1972: 26, 70). Some claim that in modern times we are just becoming better at hiding our true and inner self whether it is racist or prejudiced in any way.

Hannah Arendt (2003 [1967]) wrote from the philosopher’s viewpoint about truth and power in an article published in the New Yorker. ² What she explored historically and from the rational or logical direction was how truth and politics are as she put it ‘. . . on rather bad terms with each other’ (2003: 545 [1967]). She mentioned how the English philosopher of the 16th and 17th-centuries, Hobbes, wrote: ‘such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome’. He also commented on the nature of mathematical truth which occupies a special category and is never disputed, for example: Euclidean geometry dictates that ‘the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square’ and ‘that the burning of all books of geometry’ would not be radically effective in discounting that truth. But Arendt went on to describe various historical circumstances and we can be familiar with these principles, such as how factual truth other than mathematical may not survive the musculature of power. She mentions how it was likely known throughout Russia that the gulags existed in Stalinist times but to state it risked almost certain death. We only need to think of the politics of North Korea for a contemporary equivalent. I would suggest also that in contemporary times the science of climate change is denied or disavowed by many politicians and so-called climate sceptics. Former Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbot said ‘coal is good for humanity’ ³ (2014). Arendt noted that while truth will always be defeated in a ‘head-on’ clash with power nevertheless it has great strength in that persuasion and violence can never replace it. While Arendt was most interested in politics of the state we can see that these ideas apply to any political situation using the term more broadly in the life of ideas, movements and so on. Arendt closed her essay with this sentence: ‘Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches before us’ (2003: 574 [1967]).

Like most aspects of life Shakespeare has had something to say in relation to truth: Polonius in Hamlet (1601): ‘this above all: to thine own self be true, / and it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man (I. iii. 75)’. Here Polonius is giving advice to his son Laertes about the ways of living a life with wisdom as opposed to being taken in by the appeal of a gaudy and superficial life. He also gives advice here to his daughter, Ophelia, about being wary of the love proclaimed by Hamlet for her and to not give herself bodily freely to him without the utmost care and to not be taken in by his protestations of love because he is young and full of spirit and promise that may come to nothing. The Shakespearean discourse can be seen as involving the pursuit of what it is to be human and this is what Harold Bloom (1998), distinguished U.S. Professor of Literature, meant when he said that Shakespeare invented the human. It is also what Frank Kermode (2000), Professor of Modern English and Poetry in the U.K. referred to in the character of Hamlet (2013).

Context

The influence of the Helmholtz school in Germany upon Freud and his theories is well known (Bernfeld, 1944) but it is of relevance in this context so I will briefly summarize what is known. A group of medical students, Brucke, Du Bois-Reymond and Helmholtz, their leader, at the University of Berlin in the 1840s, developed concepts in their field of physics and physiology which was also called ‘thermodynamics’. Quite simply their theories stated that chemical and physical principles alone were responsible for the operation of living organisms as opposed to vitalism which could be seen as a reference to the soul or at least the not physical. Helmholtz developed the first law of thermodynamics which was to do with the conservation of energy and forces in a system.

Thermodynamics is also to do with the flow of fluid systems and what we could call the economy of energy and entropy. Brucke later came to be one of Freud’s teachers at the University of Vienna and we can see how these influences came to be expressed in his later Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) but also his later metapsychology. My point here is not just to describe historically these matters but to demonstrate that it is not possible to separate the so-called ‘discoveries’ that come to be made from the contexts from which they spring. The 19th-century was one in which all types of inventions were being made such as Stevenson’s steam engine, Brunel’s design and construction of the sewerage system in London to mention but two which are very much to do with movement, flow, power and energy in the mechanical sense. Thermodynamics is still a major science today but can we imagine its significance over one hundred years ago. So of course ‘dynamic’ theories of movement, flow and forces moving from one area to another (first law of thermodynamics) came to be expressed in Freud’s earliest theories. But the notion of instincts and drives was maintained although undergoing various adjustments along the way. Of course the other influential ‘discoverer’ of the times was Charles Darwin (1859) and his theory of ‘natural selection’ which owes a great deal to the operation of instincts and survival of the species. Freud was an admirer of Darwin’s work. Foucault might have added that what was presented as ‘truth’ at the time was a zeitgeist of the times with the implication that these matters presented or ‘discovered’ at another time in history may well have encountered another fate.

Wilfred Bion, ‘O’ and Truth

Bion (1965) introduced the concept of ‘O’ which he defined as the ‘ultimate reality’ or absolute truth, the infinite and the ‘thing in itself’. According to the Symingtons (1996), Bion did not believe that this ultimate reality could be achieved, only moved towards rather like a mathematical asymptote. The Symingtons put forward the view that he was an independent thinker not of any particular analytic school and interested in pursuing wherever his mind and experience took him rather than a slave to any particular discipline or group. His latter conceptual developments as is known tended towards mysticism. To my mind mysticism has something to do with moving toward an experience that is less concretely connected with our physical world and more to do with moving toward a world larger than oneself and yet paradoxically of oneself or even within oneself. For me this might come from encountering the sublime wonder of raw nature, viewing certain works of art, encountering a Greek myth or experiencing by reading or viewing one of Shakespeare’s plays. For me such experiences seem to require or be magnified by the sharing of the experience with at least one other. In psychoanalysis free association in the presence of a psychoanalytic other may allow an approach to ‘O’ but it also may not. In an analytic group there are times when something equivalent to ‘O’ may be approached and that is with truly free discussion and the arrival at authenticity and sincerity with others. It is also the case that this may not develop.

A long time ago I heard this saying: ‘If you meet Buddha on the road kill him’. I struggled with this at a deep level for some time but it fits into the context of the thinking I am sharing here. The saying is considered a ‘koan’ and originating some say from an historical figure, Chinese Buddhist Zen master Linji Yixuan (866AD) (2009). A koan is an apparently paradoxical statement or insoluble riddle meant to draw attention to something that is beyond logical grasp and is meant to evoke doubt, thought and enlightenment. Another meaning I think would be always to doubt what is presented as the truth and meant to evaporate doubt. Perhaps this is what Bion was alluding to when he challenged the positivism of Freudian ideas and their derivatives.

There is particular value of an analytic group approach in dealing with sincerity or authenticity. It is the case with respect to mobs or the herd mentality that the individual may be lost and a low common denominator may prevail. This was Freud’s view in his article Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). However, in an analytic group a fundamental quality is the opportunity for each individual to be confronted by their insincerity or lack of authenticity by others in the group. A feature of such a group experience is the mirroring of aspects of the self in others via a form of projective identification. This is also the mechanism via which narcissistic disorders can be worked with in a group context.

Discourse and Truth

Teun Van Dijk, a Dutch academic, Professor in Discourse Studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona has contributed much to the field of discourse analysis but from a different direction. He has written extensively on how discourse is intimately related to power and for example, racism. He defines discourse for his purposes as meaning only a ‘specific communicative event, in general, and a written or oral form of verbal interaction or language use, in particular’ (2002: 146). Much of his work entails the specific documentation of how institutions gain and maintain power in subtle or not so subtle ways. For example, he has described how corporate discourse frequently blames the victim because of say, language difficulties, lack of skills and education and that this discourse often has easy access to the press as well as politicians. We can think here of the catchy statement that there are ‘lifters and leaners’ ⁴ (2014) or ‘illegal immigrants’ ⁵ (2013, 21 October) as opposed to ‘asylum seekers’ or the old but familiar term of ‘dole bludger’. Such statements can be taken up by the popular and conservative press both of which may have an investment in the portrayal of minority groups as dangerous or lazy: think here of the term ‘terrorist’ and the recent controversy about wearing Muslim burkas in the Australian national parliament building and the ‘guns under the burka’ discourse. Van Dijk documents in Europe what is familiar in many countries, for example, in almost any local tabloid from time to time the extreme characterization of certain minorities as mad or bad. All of this promotes the view that the danger is out there quite apart from the objective fact that there may be danger out there. I am talking here of the conscious manipulation of public opinion and the promotion of a racist discourse that for the masses remains largely unconscious at least for much of the time: here think of the so-called ‘dog-whistle’ phenomenon. I want to be clear here that while I have selected some recent and familiar prejudicial labels perhaps linked with the previous conservative Abbott Australian national government these modes of using discourse to convey a hidden or not so hidden message are universal to all political parties and politics.

Organizations and the Perversion of Truth

Douglas Kirsner (2000) carried out detailed interviews with 150 psychoanalysts being members of the American Psychoanalytic Association over some years. At the time there were perhaps 5000 analysts throughout the U.S. as members of a number of analytic associations. Those interviewed were practising in one of four major centres: New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. Simply put, it allowed an expose of serious organizational dysfunction. More than this though, it seemed to demonstrate widespread practices of what Kirsner called the ‘anointment’ of successors to become training analysts and the prejudiced directing of trainees down particular paths. This process of anointment and other practices suggested that psychoanalytic institutes were functioning in some ways like religions of faith or clubs with no public reference. Further, that power struggles were endemic. ‘Virtually no holds are barred in psychoanalytic battles over the right to train and qualify analysts (Kirsner, 2000: 225)’.

The battles seemed to centre around training and the selection of training analysts. Legal battles and gross examples of aggression are reported. He described how financial income and the power to put in place trainees who have received very similar training to their training analysts and teachers were prominent. Also, that after the heyday of psychoanalysis of the mid to latter part of the 20th-century, as incomes decreased and competing therapies developed, matters became worse. As he described it, and as we know, psychoanalysis is not simply an academic discipline but a form of therapy and a ‘movement’. Kirsner said: ‘I suggest that the claim to knowledge implied by qualification is far greater than the real level of knowledge (2000: 233)’. He said that this matter is not faced and instead anointment is practised. He saw that the difficulties go back to Freud and the way he established and propagated psychoanalysis. As a result his followers developed a faith in him and that transferences continue. Freud strongly believed and stated that ‘We possess the truth’. Kirsner quotes Joyce McDougal: ‘I think our greatest perversion (my italics) is to believe we hold the key to the truth . . . any analytic school who thinks this way has turned its doctrine into a religion’ (2000: 236). My final quote from Kirsner:

. . . the gap between the small base of verifiable knowledge and the high level of ‘pretend’ knowledge fostered by training and practice has grown to such a worrisome extent that the very question of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ is less and less posed nowadays. (Kirsner, 2000: 249)

I could go on! You would be wrong if you considered these matters were or are isolated to the U.S: they are not. Kirsner, I suspect, was given access because he was a foreigner. In some ways these matters are familiar in any analytic psychotherapy institution as far as I can tell although they can be neutralized or confronted but first they must be identified. They are vital to apprehend and comprehend.

Conclusion

An understanding of how knowledge and power become expressed and interact may be deepened by a consideration of the foregoing. Without such awareness the possibility, even perhaps the inevitability, of the perversion of group and organizational life may be heightened. Consequently there may be little to stand in the way of falsehoods coming to masquerade as truth. At the very least we need to maintain a healthy suspicion of any claim of absolute truth at any point in time.

In conclusion, perhaps we can all reflect in our various spheres of activity on the relationships between power, knowledge and truth and in particular what constitutes power, knowledge and truth.