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Philosophers have enumerated three criteria of truth: coherence, correspondence and pragmatic. I shall define them and examine some of the relations among them. My overarching argument is that these three criteria of truth, when adequately defined, can be seen not to be at odds with each other but to work together in the search for truths in clinical psychoanalysis. I write 'truths' not because I think that truth is relative but because I do not subscribe to any metaphysical theory of absolute truth as in Plato, Descartes or Hegel.A secondary purpose is to sustain a distinction between two concepts of inter-subjectivity. The first concept is the one that we are familiar with in common sense, scholarship and science: an observation is intersubjective, if it can be made by any competent observer of the relevant domain of fact. What is intersubjective in observation is the opposite of what is subjective, i.e. opposite to what, in an observation, belongs to the idiosyncrasies of the observer and not to what is being observed. The second, very different notion of intersubjectivity is that it consists of inextricable transference and countertransference interactions that take place in the relation between analyst and analysand in psychoanalysis and which result in the co-creation of the analysand whose nature and history are formed by the analytic relation. This definition of intersubjectivity legislates the historical being of the individual, a being that is independent of the analyst, out of existence. To Aristotle's rhetorical question: 'That nature exists who can doubt?' contemporary subjectivist analysts reply: 'Psychoanalysts should doubt the independent existence of at least that part of nature that is psychic reality'. Subjectivism repudiates the epistemic independence of the patient in his or her relation to the analyst and, consistency would require, the same of the analyst in his or her relation to the patient. Of course, we analysts sometimes feel differently about different patients. The vignette below illustrates an exceptional anxiety in the analyst in response to a patient. But from these and similar facts it cannot be inferred that an analyst's capacity to know is inevitably altered by his or her responses to each patient. After all an appropriate affective response will normally quicken rather than compromise the analyst's observation and thought.To be sure, our work as clinicians reminds us of the manifold ways in which our own personalities, beliefs and affects can interfere with our clinical work. Our clinical observations and thinking are intrinsically fallible. But it does not follow that they are in principle subjective or that we are intrinsically snared in intersubjectivity of the second kind or that we can

To clarify the concepts of critical realism, subjectivity, and subjectivism, distinctions are drawn among ontological subjectivism, moral subjectivity, psychological subjectivity, and epistemological subjectivism. Psychological subjectivity, including the ongoing affective life of the analyst, is an essential aspect of the analyst's response to the patient, and may either facilitate or distort an adequate observation of transference and countertransference dynamics and of the psychic reality of the patient. Subjectivism in current psychoanalytic literature involves an argument that there is an "irreducible" subjectivity in the analyst, who is bound to see things from an incorrigibly personal point of view, such that there is no substantial subject-object differentiation between analyst and patient. Issues of authoritarianism in the analyst, or of pathological certainty, should not be confused with the issues of epistemological objectivism. The concept of critical realism or scientific objectivism includes the essential idea that there is no pure knowledge, no complete knowledge, that often evidence is insufficient for knowledge of some aspect of nature, and that care must be to taken understand what is sufficient knowledge in a given area, in this case clinical psychoanalysis. The question is raised whether "projective identification" makes the sorting out of "what comes from whom" impossible. It is argued that when free association is sufficiently facilitated, when there are enough corrections of the distortions wrought by transference and countertransference, when defenses are analyzed, and when sufficient subject-object differentiation is recovered, the analyst can get to know enough of the patient's psychic reality for the therapeutic and scientific purposes of psychoanalysis.

Epistemological subjectivism has found its way into psychoanalysis along several theoretical and clinical paths. It has developed out of the clinical interest in transference and countertransference and, in particular, from the broadly generalized definition of countertransference now popular. The clinically necessary attention to analyst-analysand interaction has been turned into interactionism or intersubjectivism and a denial of epistemological subject-object differentiation. These perspectives transform a clinical focus on the here and now of the analytic relation into the determination of the past by the present and a teleological reversal of causality. Once this reversal is made, narrative in the analytic situation becomes the co-creation of the analysand's past by the present analyst-analysand relation. Psychoanalysis, on this view, can at best substitute a coherent, novelistic account for the life history of a person. Some of the problems of subjectivism are examined here with a view to restoring to psychoanalysis the epistemology of science and common sense.

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