ABSTRACT
Richard Sterba describes a therapeutic split between the observing ego and the experiencing ego – a split which is perceived as necessary for the analysand to assume a standpoint considered in some sense "outside" of immediate experience. The assumptions attendant to this model of subjectivity have been substantially challenged by the more recent emphasis on the self's pluralism. The human being recognizes as true what has the most comprehensive self-evidence and opens up the most illuminating perspectives. And this is not a truth "as if", with the reservation that we cannot help but think like that, but the strongest affirmation in actual conscious life of which a human being is capable. The popular conceit that our beliefs are interchangeable is reflected in the oft adopted metaphor that our biases might be conceptualized as "lenses" which can effectively be removed and replaced so as to "try on" a different worldview.
