Human beings are good at influencing others and bad at describing reality. For one thing, our chief method of describing reality is verbal, and almost all speech is metaphorical; a metaphor elicits a response that is analogous to the response to the thing being described. We react to the word coffee in some ways that are similar to how we react to actual coffee (we smell and visualize similarly, and we engage in certain similar associations). The etymology of emotional words derives from actions, so they are all metaphors as well. Anger, for example, means what it feels like to want to strangle someone. We are bad at accurate recall, at representing things as they were. Journalists and scientific observers have to be taught (and never quite successfully) how to report facts before interpreting them, and the entire scientific enterprise is an effort to establish a culture in which describing reality accurately is more valued than pleasing other people. Conversely, we are very good at evaluating a communication for how it makes us feel, but not for what it means.
What we typically mean by objective truth, according to the pragmatists, is a statement that, reasonably interpreted, describes the world in a way that leads to successful action. However, most actions we take that rely on verbal descriptions occur in the social sphere, so we often confuse objective truth with cultural assumptions.
The same features of statements that signal objective truth arise even in statements that cannot be acted upon. For example, as I wrote here, there are very few situations in which it matters whether or not the sun revolves around the earth. Rocket scientists have to know what’s right to plan a Mars landing, but to most of us, the only applications of this description of reality are social: getting approval (or looking like a badass independent thinker) in school or in conversation. Most people have no geographical behavior depending on a correct statement about the capital of Oregon, so the reason we bother to correct children and misinformed people who think it’s Portland is to maintain a culture of aligning descriptions with reality, even if contingent geographical behavior (say, where to go when you get elected governor of Oregon) is rare.
It’s hard to distinguish statements designed to describe reality from statements designed to influence people. “Stop!” might mean, “the traffic light is red,” a description of reality, and “the butter is behind the milk” might mean, “Look behind the milk,” an attempt to influence. This is nowhere more true than in interpreting the Bible, where many readers take it as objective truth despite Jesus’s ridiculing those who do: “How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread?” Matthew 16:11. One reason it is so difficult to distinguish them is that in our day to day world we act as if we are concerned about geographical reality but really we are concerned about what other people do. Genuine tests of putatively true statements are rare compared to the more likely social reinforcers—approval, attention, affection, and compliance. The whole replicability crisis in psychological research is a function of all-too-human scientists pursuing approval and accolades rather than the truth about reality. Most of us are playing Family Feud (the game show where you win by guessing what most people think) rather than Jeopardy (the game show where you win by getting it right), but scientists are supposed to be playing Jeopardy.
So the biggest problem with the search for the objective truth is that people rarely care what the objective truth might be; people are much more concerned about other people’s approval than about what’s what.
When patients talk to their therapists, the therapists tend to treat their speech as descriptions of reality, what I call journalism. Therapists then think things like, “Her mother was self-absorbed and didn’t meet her needs,” or “Her boyfriend doesn’t really care about her.” In consultation, I question the utility of treating the patient’s speech as journalism, and the therapist looks at me like I am accusing the patient of being deceitful or biased; the therapist then defends the patient. Of course, I am accusing the patient of no such thing. Deceit and bias have meaning only if someone is claiming that the patient’s statement is objectively true, and that someone is usually the therapist. I think the patient is reminded of certain events and reporting them in a certain way in order to have an effect on the therapist and to perform a certain version of the self.
The view of patients’ speech as literary rather than as journalistic leads therapists to stop saying things like, “No wonder you have a bad boyfriend—your mother never cared for you,” and things like, “Why do you stay with someone so narcissistic?” It leads them to say psychologically truthful and useful things that don’t depend on what the mother and boyfriend are like. “Whenever you advise yourself on how to behave, you tend not to take your own needs into account. You advise yourself in the guise of a self-absorbed mother.” “You paint a picture of a narcissist and then you insist that he is right for you.”
Viewing the patient’s speech as literary requires an understanding only of what is going on in the therapy office. This, too, is subject to bias, but the bias can be checked in real time. When patients are reminded of self-absorbed mothers, therapists can ask themselves if they have recently been self-absorbed in some way. The therapist treats the speech act as a metaphor about the therapy, a bit of poetry. The therapist should be thinking, “I wonder why we’re talking about this now,” and not, “I wonder what happened to you as a child.”
The literary view has two other advantages. One is that it frames the patient as competent rather than as defective. Humans are terrific symbol-users and meaning-makers. As noted, this is most obvious in dreams. You don’t have to be William Shakespeare or George Eliot to make a great dream; you are already good at literature if only you would stop interfering with your imagination (as you do stop when you’re asleep or saying whatever comes to mind). On the other hand, humans are terrible journalists. We make impaired eyewitnesses, for example. We can’t even say with certainty what happened yesterday at lunch, much less what happened decades ago when we were children.
The other advantage of the literary view is that it promotes intimacy and collaboration. Many problems that bring people to therapy interfere with intimacy and collaboration, and one way to think about how therapy helps is that it acclimates patients to successful intimacy and collaboration (often by resolving barriers to these). The journalistic approach makes the patient a reporter and the therapist a doctor or advisor, which is a kind of collaboration that involves judgment and does not involve intimacy, a kind that puts all the expertise in the doctor. The key question for journalism is, “What actually happened?” The literary approach treats the patient’s speech as a function of its occasioning environment, as a function of the relationship between the two people. The collaboration involves the mutual search for meaning and explorations of what role the patient is trying to pull off (how the patient is trying to influence the therapist) and what the therapist might be doing to influence the patient. The key question is, “What is actually happening?”