Useful Untruths: A Plea for the Necessity of Pluralism in Child Analysis

ABSTRACT The late nineteenth century philosopher Hans Vaihinger and the preeminent contemporary philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah contend that in order to see a more complete picture of the world, we need a plurality of pictures with which to view it, not just one. This truth comes with epistemological burdens and with the inconvenient fact that the human mind is unable to juggle more than one picture or theory simultaneously. Thus, psychoanalytic clinicians tend to select one theory as a guide when treating patients. In this paper, I will offer ways to think about this conundrum as it appears in the child psychoanalytic setting and whether it is possible to shift from one’s usual theoretical point of view to include alternate theoretical perspectives – and thus, to gain a more complete “truth”, as Vaihinger and Appiah suggest we should aspire to – as the clinical situation allows.