Reflections on truth and self-knowledge in psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic practice

Determining their epistemological stance on therapeutic matters is a common challenge faced by psychotherapy practitioners and psychologists. Psychotherapy encompasses a wide range of techniques and theories, providing an integrative and fertile space for exploration. Feyerabend suggests that adopting the guiding principle of "everything is good" in research, regardless of the theory being considered, can be a beneficial approach to enhance our understanding of complex phenomena. However, this consideration could become into a mess and confusion, facing psychotherapeutic exercise.

In Peru, there is a famous saint named Martin de Porres, who is associated with various miracles. One such miracle is the story of De Porres bringing together three natural enemies: a dog, a cat, and a mouse and making them live peacefully.

Therefore, the coexistence between the scientific and non-scientific positions, those which come from a formal statement of the science and those coming from other approaches, questions not only the way to build knowledge but what we assume is truth.

Particularly intuitive reasoning based on singularities and the illogical aspects can contribute to the understanding of human psychology, but it needs to be supported by deeply thinking and fundamentals.

This article, framed by, but not restricted to, the epistemological ideas of the Peruvian philosopher Pablo Quintanilla about the relations between the self-knowledge and another kind of knowledge, aims to provide for the psychotherapeutic field, some further insights about the truth coming from the patient’s natural nuclear self-consciousness knowledge that is built by the interaction of three elements: the subject (patient) himself, the relation between the subject and subject (patient with himself) and the relation between the subject with a third party (patient with the psychotherapist and the world).