Psychoanalysis as a natural science: Reconsidering Freud's “scientistic self-misunderstanding”

Abstract

This paper centres on Habermas's judgement that when Freud assesses psychoanalysis as a natural science, this constitutes a scientific self-misunderstanding. The author discusses Brenner's conviction that Freud's view is not a misunderstanding but is true for psychoanalysis and rejects his conclusion. In the author's view, Freud's assessment of psychoanalysis must be seen as a misunderstanding whose basis lies in its subject. Unconscious figures assert themselves under the repetition compulsion in the same manner as natural laws, each of which asserts itself beyond individual consciousness. It was the discovery of the unconscious that led Freud to conceive of psychoanalysis as a natural science and it seems that this conception is rooted in the structural identity between unconscious and natural processes. Freud's misunderstanding of pseudo-nature as nature seems to be indebted to his energy concept. As it is impossible to deduce psychic energies and their distribution by means of the psychoanalytic method, this being dependent on language, the author recommends replacing the economic metapsychological viewpoint by an affective one. The author goes on further to discuss the object of psychoanalytic investigation, the psychoanalytic method used to acquire knowledge, and the function held by metapsychology.

Key words:

• psychoanalysis
• natural science
• unconscious
• compulsion to repeat

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Simon Thomas and Judith Zepf, M.A., for their painstaking work in editing the original manuscript.

Notes

¹Further arguments against Grünbaum's objections can be found in Phillips (1987) and Wolfenstein (1990).

²The essence is not an abstraction that comes from “above” or from “outside” into the object, but rather “the essential” of a phenomenon. I do not intend to engage here in a detailed discussion of the philosophically charged relationship between appearance and essence, but note that both terms refer to different aspects of the same reality and presuppose themselves mutually. To speak of an appearance is meaningful only if one separates appearance from what appears. Usually the issue that appears is termed “essence.” The two terms “essence” and “appearance” keep two aspects of reality apart and put them together in a certain way. The term “essence” refers to the essential conditions that determine the surface shape of the object. One aspect of reality, the conditions, appears in another aspect, for whose formation this aspect is essential.

³Marie Bonaparte reports that Freud told her a story of how to cook a grouse: “‘You first bury it in the earth for a week and then dig it up again.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Then you throw it away!’” (Jones, 1953, p. 288).

⁴For a more detailed epistemological foundation of this process, see Holzkamp (1974).

⁵The years in which Freud's papers were published are given according to Meyer-Palmedo and Fichtner (1999).

⁶Holt (1981, p. 137) states:

Klein, Gill and others say that . . . metapsychology is a theory about the clinical theory. Let us clear up this misunderstanding right away: Meta-theory (a term introduced by Carnap) “is a theory concerned with the investigation, analysis, or description of theory itself” . . . It is thus a branch of the philosophy of science, and whatever else metapsychology may be, it is not that.

⁷Furthermore, Rapaport (1959, p. 101) proposes a psychosocial viewpoint that I will not discuss here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siegfried Zepf

Author

Siegfried Zepf, M.D., is former director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic Medicine of the University of Saarland, training analyst (DPG, DGPT), member of the Saarland Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (SIPP).