Psychoanalysis and the Ideologies of Science

Abstract

Despite burgeoning interest in psychoanalytic thought throughout many disciplines in the humanities, psychoanalysis today is facing a crisis. Confronted with methodological, discursive, epistemological, and empirical challenges to theory and practice, not to mention waning public interest in psychoanalytic treatment, psychoanalysis continues to find itself displaced from mainstream scientific and therapeutic approaches within the behavioral sciences. Not only is psychoanalysis questioned on its scientific credibility and therapeutic efficacy from other disciplines, it is even disputed within contemporary psychoanalysis itself. Criticized for its theoretical models and scientific questionability, psychoanalysis faces critique by the new empiricists who are at once eager to legitimize and refine the discipline, yet are radical in their dismissal of many of the cardinal elements that have historically defined the profession. In this article, I challenge the ideologies of science, which are reflective of a privileged, hegemonic master discourse. The force of this discourse is built upon a fantasized objectivist epistemology and reductionist framework that is far removed from the human condition. I attempt to argue that science lacks true explanation as it artificially reduces the human being to simplistic, naive theories of parsimony that carry dogmatic ontological assertions about mind, human nature, and behavior. Such reductive paradigms further ignore the role of theoretics and subjectivity that by definition saturate any empirical method, and hence color its results; not to mention import an inflated valuation of the alleged virtue of empiricism itself.

Notes

¹ To be fair to my research colleagues, many thoughtful empiricists recognize the limits to empirical measures and the dangers of overgeneralizability of results, which are typically more measured, contingent, qualified, and less deterministic. It is within the traditional philosophical debates against scientism as an epistemological and political movement lambasting or disqualifying other legitimate discourses that these criticisms are directed.

² Although intended for another context, physicist Victor Stenger (2007) made the interesting and perspicacious observation that “a number of studies have claimed to be able to overcome the lack of statistical significance of single experiments by using a technique called ‘metanalysis,’ in which the results of many experiments are combined. This procedure is highly questionable. I am unaware of any extraordinary discovery in all of science that was made using metanalysis. If several, independent experiments do not find significant evidence for a phenomenon, we surely cannot expect a purely mathematical manipulation of the combinded data to suddenly produce a major discovery” (p. 93). And this is coming from an academic astrophysicist.

³ This is one reason why the fields of phenomenology and hermeneutics reproach scientific methodology for its lack of reflectivity and for not examining the true object in question in its native form and as it exists in its phenomenal moment or modes of appearance. These philosophical criticisms of the scientific method also extend to the subjectivity of the researchers who assume they can extricate themselves from their subject matter under the guise of pure objectivity. These are axiomatic challenges—hence categorical arguments—directed toward the philosophical frameworks informing scientific paradigms that rely on the control and manipulation of experimental variables, hence they are ideological oppositions to the essence of science. The controlling of variables that lead to reduction and simplification of the phenomenon in question in the service of avoiding logical or inferential errors begs the question of the accuracy and generalizability of results if they do not reflect a pure analysis of the actual phenomenon itself. This is why philosophy has historically always offered alternative models of explanation that originally rely on metaphysics, which are speculative, abductive, and empirical in scope, beginning with the ancients’ preoccupation with mind and matter, later refined by the modern philosophers, advanced more by the German and British idealists, and culminating in the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions of 20th century continental philosophy. Given that human behavior and mental processes are far more complicated than studying organic matter in a test tube or under a microscope, such as in biochemistry, the ideological challenge to scientism from phenomenological hermeneutics stands as a valid criticism toward many branches of empirical psychology today.

⁴ See my discussion and critique of reductive material ontologies (Mills, 2010), pp. 10-12, 251, 263n9.

⁵ With the exception of Ansermet and Magistretti’s (2007) work, I am unaware of any contemporary empirical research in neuroscience or the philosophy of mind that attempts to address the question of causality, agency, and human freedom that does not devolve into material reduction, epiphenomenalism, and brain or evolutionary discourse. The fundamental problem here lies between ontology and phenomenology: the former is primarily concerned with foundational aspects or first principles and the question of ultimate reality; the latter is concerned with preserving the source, force, and independence of lived experience and its qualitative manifestations. Because science employs reductive models and the humanities resist such tendencies, I am afraid there will always remain an ideological clash of theoretical assumptions and their imported values.

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Notes on contributors

Jon Mills

Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., C.Psych., ABPP, is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto and is the author of many works in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychology, including thirteen books. In 2006, 2011, and 2013 he was recognized with a Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in New York City for his scholarship, received a Goethe Award for best book in 2013, and in 2008 was given a Significant Contribution to Canadian Psychology Award by the Section on Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology of the Canadian Psychological Association. He runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada.