What Kind of Science Is Psychoanalysis?

Abstract

Discussions of the scientific status of psychoanalysis are commonly based on the sharp separation between “facts” and the telling of those facts, between logic and rhetoric. This distinction automatically discards the singular contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of human action. It is also inconsistent with current developments in understanding science generally, and human sciences in particular. Historical circumstances, and a confusion between one particular epistemological stance and rigor, have given limited views of science particular prestige in the psychoanalytic community. In this article, we show how psychoanalysis may be usefully viewed as a human science.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at The American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, 1991.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at The American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, 1991.

¹Although these studies were in the spirit of Helmholtz's ideal, they were essentially observational rather than experimental. Even early in his intellectual life, although Freud admired experimentation, his actual investigations were observational and interpretative, rather than hypothesis testing. Naturalistic observation and clinical case study use the same method, and it is through them that Freud made his contributions, both before and after the advent of psychoanalysis. Freud's vision of science focused on its content, not its methods.

²Advocates of the “basic science” approach commonly use the spectacular effectiveness of “scientific medicine” to explain this focus. Yet enthusiasm for “basic science” antedates, by 60 years, the demonstration of its value. It was only following the Second World War that laboratory research substantially changed the therapeutic effectiveness of physicians. The prestige of “scientific medicine” in the United States, for example, reached its peak when physicians had virtually nothing to offer by way of (scientifically) rational therapeutics (Warner, 1991).

³There is considerable controversy about the relative influence of the Continental and Empiricist philosophers on Freud's scientific worldview. Bernfeld (1941, 1951) and Sulloway (1979) emphasize the influence of Helmholtz and Continental philosophy following Kant, but Gay stresses the impact of the British empiricist tradition of Hume. Citing Freud's 1871–1875 letters to Silberstein, Toews (1991) criticizes Gay's description and maintains that it is misleading to read Freud in the tradition of “positivism and biophysical reductionism” (p. 505). However, review of these letters (letter to Silbertsein of 3/15/1875; 4/11/1875) shows that Freud followed his mentor Franz Brentano's example in being critical of Kant's concern with the effort to either prove or disprove God's existence. (Freud found the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach's comments on God as evidence of an alienated humankind to be a more useful focus for discussion; letter to Silberstein of 3/7/1895). However, most significant, Freud praises the work of Locke, Hume, James, and John Stuart Mill (whose work he later translated from English to German) as particularly relevant in the construction of a scientific worldview. Freud's fascination with Darwin further supports the idea that Freud was particularly influenced by Anglo-American empiricism. McGrath's (1986) detailed discussion of historical influences on Freud's scientific worldview also supports the idea that Freud was particularly influenced by the work of the British empiricists. At the same time, as Toews (1991) notes, concepts of mental representation that were to play such an important role in psychoanalytic thought appear closely related to the formulations of Helmholtz and his students, including Brücke, who relied implicitly on Kantian idealism.

⁴Obeyesekere (1970) observes that the work of culture is to construct and maintain meanings that lead to a sense of collective and personal coherence and continuity. This experience of coherence is founded in the stories which are told—not on another level of reality beyond belief, not some invisible foundation. There is no reality above and beyond the world of meanings as realized in stories, including the story of the life history itself.

⁵The recognition that the investigator and the object of investigation could not be entirely separated led to a crisis in physical theory following Heisenberg's (1930) discovery of the uncertainty principle. But this level of observer and observed was mild and easily characterized compared to kinds of interactions characteristic of the human sciences, including psychoanalysis (Galatzer-Levy, 1980).

⁶Kohut's (1984) methodological contribution is somewhat obscured by his use of the ambiguous term empathy to describe the analyst's observational stance. Unfortunately, the term suggests a range of extraneous notions, from telepathy to sympathy. Kohut's (1984) assertion of the healing value of empathy complicates the discussion further. We believe that empathy, as Kohut used the term, simply refers to the explicit recognition that it is centrally important to recognize that the patient is a person, like the analyst, whose wishes, intents, understandings, and stories are inherently important, worthy of attention, and best understood from this human (and humane) point of view. The patient is best understood from near his experience. This is in contrast to a position distant from the patient's experience, which attempts to describe him as an elaborate mechanism, whose wishes, intents, etc. are epiphenomena, that are, most likely, an impediment to scientific understanding.

⁷It is perhaps for this reason that stories of Freud's continued, and thoroughly dangerous, capacity for contempt for Nazism, even as the Gestapo invaded his home, are so appealing to psychoanalysts. The man who could conclude a letter he was forced to write by his captors with the phrase “I would recommend them to you highly” (incidentally, the same man who so quickly recognized that Dora was treating him like a dismissed servant with her choice of a stopping date for her analysis) seemed the embodiment of the power of rational, humane intellect over the forces of chaotic evil.

⁸In our society, the material truth of a story makes it rhetorically more powerful, so that the question of whether the events recounted actually occurred may gain particular importance (Galatzer-Levy, 1994). Note that the signficance of material reality in this context derives primarily from rhetorical impact, not questions of scientific truth.

⁹Discomfort with the narrative perspective is characteristic of those who continue to view the past of the analysand as a distinctive reality apart from the story that is told about the personal past. This position has been explicated with perhaps the greatest sophistication by Modell (1990):

Whatever the philosophical status of the narrative mode may be, when it is applied to psychoanalysis, there seems to be a confusion between literature and the investigation of human psychology. Even if we put aside for the moment the controversy concerning the “placement” of psychoanalysis, whether it is a scientific or a hermeneutic discipline, the fact remains that human lives are not an open narrative whose story lines can be capriciously altered in one direction or another. The analogy between psychoanalysis and the narrative text has been overextended and ultimately cannot be supported because it ignores the fundamental fact that I have been emphasizing in this book: the past cannot simply be reconstructed arbitrarily because it is rooted in ineradicable affective experiences [pp. 85–86, italics ours].

¹⁰Much of contemporary research regarding psychoanalytic process and outcome works within the text of the psychoanalytic hour (e.g., Luborsky, 1967; Dahl, 1974, Dahl, Teller, Moss, and Trujillo, 1978; Gill and Hoffman, 1982a; Bucci, 1985). A next step in such research involves using codes based on transcripts of psychoanalytic hours, integrating the study of the psychoanalytic narrative as constructed story with details of the emerging relationship between analyst and analysand.