Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Epistemological context
While I have identified ontology of connection and posited an epistemology of relational
seeing/revealing, psychoanalysis has existing epistemologies of its own. Grix argues,
‘epistemology … is concerned with developing new models of theories that are better than
competing models and feelings, knowledge, and the ways of discovering it, are not static,
but forever changing’ (Grix 2001: 27). Marcus and Rosenberg asked psychoanalysts to
answer the following questions:
• What is your version of the world, your conception of the human condition? What
are the central problematics that the individual struggles with within his larger social
context?
• In the light of your conception of the human condition, how is individual
psychopathology understood?
• How does this conception of the human condition inform your type of clinical
psychoanalysis as it attempts to alleviate individual psychopathology? (Marcus and
Rosenberg 1998: 6)
The nature of ‘ontological being’- ‘your version of the world’, links with epistemology
‘how is individual psychopathology understood?’ and influences clinical practice. The
epistemology of contemporary psychoanalysis can be globally summarized as a two-person,
object model that focuses on interpersonal as well as intrapsychic experience. The external
relational context and its mutual influence on the internal context led to new developments
in psychoanalysis through the object relations theories of the British ‘Independent’ tradition,
and the ego-psychology and interpersonal forms of psychoanalysis in America (Person,
Cooper, and Gabbard 2005; Cooper 2006). This builds on rational and scientific
methodologies with a renewed emphasis on hermeneutics (Gomez 2005). Winnicott’s
theoretical constructs of transitional space and phenomena, and Bion’s O, while arising out
of a complex inner object world, lead to new possibilities of knowing and being known.
The analyst moves from a position of being the ‘knower – the bearer of knowledge’ through
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