Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> I'm a little unclear on the point here. You're expected to use
> double-blind test in social scientific research.
Well, okay. I guess so. But Freud was not really involved in such a
thing. His output consisted of two main areas. One, very broad
theorizing about the nature of man and woman like "Moses and
Monotheism". Two, some dicey notions of how to treat patients. The first
area doesn't lend itself to double-blind tests, does it?***
As to the first -- in response to DD -- I agree that you don't need double blind tests. You don't have them in a lot of real science, e.g., evolutionary biology or metereology, where it is impossible to control for and replicate consitions in the way that d/b tests require, and where explanation is narrative rather than lawlike anyway. But you need some indicia of reliability, some way to test the theory, some means of falsifying it. The reason evolutionary biology is a science is you have these things in spades. You don't with psychoanalysis.
As to the second. Well, you can treat psychoanalysis as philosophy of mind rather than as science. That's not what Freud that he was up to, of course. But then you haveto havea certain conception of phil of mind. If you think it is cognitive science (as I do), then youw ill bes keptical of even this saving move.
> And Crews also
> attacks Freud's theraputic practice, but acknowledges that's
> different from attacking his purportedly scientific theory. F didn't
> claim to be just a physician with a novel therapeutic approach. He
> claimed to have made scientific discoveries about the nature and
> structure of the mind.
So did Wilhelm Reich.
****Yes, and?
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