Mapping Psychic Reality: Triangulation, Communication and Insight (Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series)

This book is about how we can deepen our understanding of subjectivity through the use of the concept of triangulation. Fundamentally, this book seeks to address the question of how we can be objective about subjectivity. If psychology, as a scientific discipline, is concerned with the study of human experience, which is essentially subjective, then we are faced with the problem of how to apply the scientific method as it is commonly understood. If experience is essentially unique to the experiencer, then there seems to be a basic incompatibility with the scientific method. As currently practiced, this method searches for psychic phenomena which can be validly measured. But this does not enable us to examine individual experience. An individual's experience seems to become impenetrable because generalization across different individuals' experience entails the loss of individuality in the generalization. Thus, in using the scientific method as it usually understood, we lose the very matter we are trying to study. This leaves us with the question of how we are going to advance our inquiry?