ABSTRACT
Some psychoanalysts hold that an intersubjective model of the mind and of the analytic situation renders the ideas of truth, reality, and objectivity obsolete. This chapter traces a certain developmental line in twentieth-century philosophy that supports an intersubjective view, a line that shows the place of the normative ideas of truth and falsity, right and wrong, in the advent of mind. Words and particular ideas mean what they do, Plato thought, by invoking the corresponding general Forms, which transcend material reality and which antedate all human minds. Plato was struck also by the fact that a judgement says something that is in principle true or false. One of the first thinkers to put forward an intersubjectivist position was G. H. Mead. Influenced by Darwin, Mead attempted to give a naturalistic account of specifically human thought by tracing it to lower, simpler orders of communication.
