ABSTRACT
Perspectivism challenges the positivist version of science that opposes the objective and the subjective, facts and interpretations, and that does so by constructing and evaluating these oppositions according to a moral logic of right and wrong. Unlike positivism, perspectivism is not nihilism in that it does not deny meaning to experience, rather it refuses to split meaning and experience apart in the first place. A rigorous encounter between psychoanalysis and Friedrich Nietzschean perspectivism—which is not the same as a scholarly appreciation of the occasional proximities of Nietzsche and Freud—is short-circuited by the anxieties evoked by passages. The “core of perspectivism” is the understanding of life as will to power—as irreducibly multiple conflict of forces—of force as relation—of the combination of forces that “binds.” Nietzsche’s philosophical concept and practice of perspectivism offers analysts a way of thinking differently about what the clinical practice of interpretation consists in, as distinct from practices of explanation.
