ABSTRACT

Some part of the patient is allied with this quest for meaning. Messages are slipped past the censor; slips, parapraxes, associations, and dreams are glimpses of hidden truth. The message-in-the-bottle (as Walker Percy called it) metaphor prevails. Truth, like the Holy Grail, is revealed to the parfait psychoanalyst, one who is without fault-sincere. If the Truth arrived at "works"; that is, if the patient changes, it tautologically reinforces the therapist's belief in his hermeneutics. Thus, as I have suggested, therapy becomes a very powerful rhetoric, a persuasion to change in the direction valued by the therapist, who may not suspect that the change occurred, not necessarily because it was "right," but because the therapy taps into a deep linguistic structure. It is as though a huckster, using powerful subliminal influencing techniques to sell a particular brand of toothpaste, succeeded, and then decided that the successful sale must prove the superiority of his product, not his propaganda. Family therapists have been fascinated by the work of Milton Erickson, a hypnotist, who is extraordinarily facile at tuning in on, and potentiating, marginal semiotic cues. Patients can be changed, against their will, or, at least, without their conscious collaboration.3 What, then, if therapeutic effectiveness depends not on the hermeneutic truth but the algorithm, the process; even worse, what if the vaunted change, the result of the process, is only that-change-not necessarily for better or for worse? If cure can become ideological indoctrination, how does the therapist know if he is right? The success of a particular theoretical set cannot be used to prove its correctness; one can only say that the therapist is effective in getting his truth acknowledged.