ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify how attempts to do research are often confused by extraneous political pressures as well as by misconceptions concerning people and things, facts and fictions, and art and science. It discusses epistemology, the study of what can be known about different kinds of phenomena, the necessary preliminary to any actual research. In order to practice psychological healing there must be a commerce with the body. The history of psychotherapy, as well as the later development of art therapy, demonstrates that this self-research inevitably involves images and the forms of understanding exemplified by art. S. Freud’s attempt in the Project to construct a ‘psychophysical monism’ within the framework of the philosophical and neurological precepts available to him in the late nineteenth century, first of all dismissed even within the psychoanalytic movement, has been praised as inspired conjecture.
