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Introduction: Fiction as Fiction
Discussing literature and psychoanalysis, the philosopher De Kesel (2005) pleads for a presence for psychoanalysis in the cultural and scientific fields. He argues that it is high time to debate the grounding principles of the human sciences - and what exactly these are. He goes on that we are not far from the point where what we might understand as reality will be replaced by image culture, leaving no space whatsoever for approaches valuing the discursive dimension of human reality. De Kesel contends that we should strive to understand reality beyond the field of images, and, at the risk of sounding strange, he makes a plea for the recognition of fiction as fiction , a recognition that is taken seriously, he argues, only in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Such a recognition does not occur in the field of psychology or in any of the myriad ways that psychology has extended itself into everyday life (to which I refer here as psychologization ).
The theoretical and practical field related to the psychological is not confined to particular sites of professional intervention but traverses the social itself (see Ingleby, 1984). Precisely because of the ubiquity of what Ingleby and others refer to as the 'psy-factor' and 'psy-matters' in terrains such as education, professional matters, and even politics, the cultural, scientific and political stakes of any debate on the principles that ground psychology and those which ground psychoanalysis are very high. Before I discuss what might be the terms of such a debate, unraveling the notion of fiction as fiction will help to elucidate the epistemological claims of psychoanalysis and those of the human sciences. Three central psychoanalytic principles guide us through this paper and help us to answer what is perhaps the most crucial question of the debate: is such a debate even possible? As I discuss each psychoanalytic principle, I contrast it with the kinds of knowledge claims found in the psy-sciences and disseminated more broadly throughout the contemporary social world. My examples of the latter are drawn from Reality TV as well as from contemporary discourses of parent and child education.
The first psychoanalytic principle to be explored is that truth has the structure of fiction . It...