Science, epistemology, and future prospects for psychoanalysis

Abstract

The question of whether or not psychoanalysis can be considered scientific has been the subject of considerable debate. While Popper classified psychoanalysis as prescientific (e.g., 1963), Grünbaum proposed that psychoanalysis is mostly falsifiable, and therefore is science, although bad science. Flax critiqued both Popper and Grünbaum for depending on positivistic criteria in their appraisal of psychoanalysis. Flax further argued that, in fact, due to the problematic nature of the Western scientific tradition, the question about whether psychoanalysis is a science cannot be answered. In contrast to Flax, we argue that there is no need to redefine the philosophies of science in order to accommodate psychoanalysis. Current developments suggest that science will in the future be better able to explain phenomena such as subjective experience, intersubjectivity, and mind–body interactions, and can potentially provide a solid framework for a scientific psychoanalysis – however, not to the exclusion of a hermeneutic-based psychoanalytic practice that should coexist, concerned with the art of interpretation.

Keywords:

• epistemology
• neuroscience
• psychoanalysis
• hermeneutics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank research assistants Rebecca Dehnel and Jinho Chung for their remarkable help with editing this manuscript.

Notes

1. Since 1981, Flax has authored many articles and essays in which she uses psychoanalytic thinking as a device to analyze many phenomena, for example, Thinking fragments: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism in the contemporary West (1990); The scandal of desire: Psychoanalysis and disruptions of gender: A meditation on Freud's three essays on the theory of sexuality (2004a); What is the subject. Review essay on psychoanalysis and feminism in postcolonial time (2004b).

2. Grünbaum notes, for example, that an “astrologer can point to a stupendous mass of favorable observational evidence based on horoscopes and biographies” (Grünbaum, 1977).

3. For a refutation of Grünbaum's NCT; see, Esterson (1996).

4. This point was emphasized by Albert Einstein (Schlipp, 1969).

5. Hermeneutic refers to the art of interpretation, a term usually used in the context of literary/text interpretation. The hermeneutics method stands in contrast to the scientific method (Steele, 1979).

6. This experiment was originally designed by Diane Rogers-Ramachandran.

7. Jon Mills (2011) critiques the hermeneutics standpoint for lacking a referent for which to anchor meaning, thus culminating in inescapable circularity, relativism, and infinite regress.

8. See, for example, The structure of psychoanalytic theory (1960).