"תחום המציאות אבד": על הדיאלקטיקה בין שלוש תפיסות של אמת בפסיכואנליזה

Background: From the day it was founded, psychoanalysis has been characterized by constant tension in its relation to truth. Freud moved between three concepts of truth: correspondence with reality, mental truth, and spiritual truth. These concepts reflect different worldviews regarding the human psyche.Aims: This article aims to show how Freud's three positions in relation to the concept of truth have become fundamental positions of three currents in the psychoanalytic movement.Method: The first part of the article describes Freud's position regarding the concept of truth. In the second part, the attitude toward truth in psychoanalysis is described as developing through three stages: ego psychology, postmodernism, and spiritual-sensitive psychoanalysis (Lev, 2015). Findings: Psychoanalysis is close to spiritual traditions and “spiritual therapies" but is not only"spiritual." The realistic, sobering legacy of Freud and his successors helped the discipline maintain a delicate and rare balance between spiritual tuning and a clear analytical vision that identifies unconscious forces that often hide behind masks of faith or morality. The knowledge of what may mistakenly be understood as “non-spiritual" is the contribution that psychoanalysis can make to a stronger understanding of “spiritual" in a way that religious practices cannot do.Conclusions: The article shows that Freud’s writings contained a dialectic of three contrasting concepts of truth. After his death, each of the concepts came to be represented by a different psychoanalytic approach. The approaches also bear a dialectic relation to other kinds of truth.