On 9 May Chris wrote [snip]: > In medicine, however, especially in the late 19th-century, the clinical > case study was a widely accepted method for providing "scientific" > evidence for a position (not quite the same as "testing hypotheses" > but that has not always been the criterion of science... [...]
> I think the answer to this question is much more difficult than most > people think (even people who have a great number of "telling" > quotations to hand), because it depends in large part on whether one > takes "scientist" to be a historically contingent term (one that means > different things in different times and places) or more of an honorific > term (one that grants an individual status within a community of people > who identify themselves as "scientists"). > [...] > My aim, instead, has been to show that answering such a question > about a historical figure is much more difficult than simply attempting > to "match up" what one casually knows about the individual in question > against what one generally considers, in the modern context, the meaning > of the term in question to be. Just like with all good scholarship, one > must first do some actual research (something self-declared scientists > are often yammering to others about, but strangely forgetful of when it > comes to a question outside their field of competence), not only about > what the person in question actually said and did, but about the cultural > including scientific) context in which they said or did it. I agree with much, possibly all, of what Chris writes here. I want to consider two elements he alludes to in the context of Freudian contentions. First the notions expressed in the first two paragraphs reproduced above, specifically: "In medicine, however, especially in the late 19th-century, the clinical case study was a widely accepted method for providing 'scientific' evidence for a position..." What then becomes important is to consider the criticisms made by Freud's contemporaries, and, if these have some justification, to examine whether Freud ignored them without providing compelling rebuttals. I recently quoted Michell Clark's insightful remark in his review of *Studies on Hysteria* about the propensity of patients to produce material in accordance with the investigator's preconceptions. Lowenfeld voiced similar objections to Freud's seduction theory claims in 1899, while a few years later Moll recognized that the problem lay deeper than this, in the analytic technique itself: "The impression created in my mind is that the theory of Freud and his followers suffices to account for the case histories, not that the clinical histories suffice to prove the truth of the theory." I know of no indication that Freud paid any heed to these critiques, other than to deny that "suggestion" played any role in the significant productions of his patients, even claiming in the case of the five-year-old Little Hans that "the small patient gave evidence of enough independence to acquit him [sic] upon the charge of 'suggestion'."; not to mention his claim at the end of his career that the danger of leading a patient astray by suggestion has been "enormously exaggerated", and that he can assert that "such an abuse of 'suggestion' has never occurred in my practice" [1937, SE 23, p. 262]. So Freud falls short on both counts. He dismissed his contemporaries' basic criticisms of his clinical procedures by diktat, and made no discernible attempt to modify his procedures. In other words, he fell decisively short by the "scientific" standards of his own day. Chris wrote: > They [some of Freud's critics] want to show, in addition, that he was > something like "corrupt" as well -- that psychoanalysis was always closer > to the flim-flam of, say, "neurolinguistic programming" than it was ever > an honest attempt to get at the underlying causes of people's > psychological troubles. I think there are two different (though possibly overlapping) things here. The founder of classical psychoanalysis may have been utterly [ie, honestly] convinced (as I believe he was) that he had made an epoch-making discovery of a technique enabling him to access unconscious ideas and memories [Freud, 1896, SE 3, pp. 191-193, 220], while (as a consequence of his utter conviction) having a propensity to over-egg the evidence that purportedly demonstrated the validity of his contention. Within that rather convoluted sentence I've used the word "purportedly" to try to indicate that even without the over-egging, Freud's evidence would not have demonstrated what he thought it had demonstrated. Among other reasons, this was because he believed in the notion which Nisbett and Ross discuss in their book *Human Inferences*, the resemblance criterion, which they quote John Stuart Mill as describing as "the prejudice that the conditions of a phenomenon must *resemble* the phenomenon" [N&R, 1980, p. 115]. Nesbitt and Ross go on to discuss the related "doctrine of signatures" and observe that "Much of the causal reasoning characteristic of the psychoanalytic tradition...shares with prescientific thought a heavy reliance on this crudest form of the representative heuristic" [pp. 116-117]. The notion of the doctrine of signatures (which he describes in simple terms as "outward signs of a buried similarity") is discussed by Donald Spence in relation to psychoanalytic inferences [Spence, 1992, pp. 558-559]. Spence goes on to take examples of Freud and other psychoanalysts using this notion to make apparent causal connections by means of resemblances in order to supposedly demonstrate the validity of an interpretation (to their own satisfaction). But, as Spence writes, the majority of published psychoanalytic interpretations (which rest heavily on such modes of argumentation) "will appeal to a convinced Freudian but will not convince the generalist" [p. 566]. That said, I don't think that questioning the scientific status of Freudian theory is a particularly productive way of assessing Freudian theory and practice. I think the controversies around Popperian theories of science have indicated that, e.g., "refutability", while obviously an important feature of scientific theories, is not the be-all and end-all of the matter by any stretch of the imagination. My personal view is that the debate in recent times over the "scientific" status of psychoanalysis is something of a red herring that has diverted attention from more productive questions, such as "what precisely is wrong with Freudian truth claims?". This is the kind of issue discussed in Cioffi's ninety-page essay "Why are we still arguing about Freud?" in *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience* (1998). Cioffi puts aside debates about the criteria for a discipline to be regarded as "scientific", and prefers to consider questions indicated by such section headings as "Is Freudian Theory Testable?", "The Inadequacy of Untestability as a Criterion of Pseudoscience", "Revisionism: When Did Psychoanalysis Stop Being Freudian � and Why?", "When Did Women Stop Wanting Penises?", and so on. In other words, everything you wanted to know about the epistemological status of psychoanalytic evidence, or hadn't even thought of! Chris wrote: > But lots of very conservative, traditional scientists defend sides of > contentious questions that, in the end, turn out to be wrong. That > doesn't undermine their status as scientists (although it usually > prevents them from having been "great" scientists -- though now my point > > above about using the term "scientist" as an honorific should be even > more clear). Freud falls short here as well. In the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus in the 1920s and 1930s against Lamarkianism being an appreciable factor in evolution, Freud retained his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which notion he incorporated into his theorizing about unconscious ideas. According to Ernest Jones, when Jones told him that no responsible biologist regarded it as any longer tenable, "All he would say is that they were all wrong". Chris wrote: >Newton claimed not even to "frame" hypotheses, much less test them. Einstein, Newton's gravitational theory nemesis [-:)], once advised you should take no notice of what physicists say about their procedures, instead watch what they do. In Newton's case, he framed a gravitational hypothesis that was (just!) refuted in naive Popperian scientific terms by unexplained anomalies in the movement of the perihelion of mercury and the magnitude of the deflection of light from stars passing close to the sun, both of which vindicated Einstein's updating of gravitational theory. References Cioffi, F. (1998). "Why Are We Still Arguing About Freud?" In F. Cioffi, *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience*, Open Court, pp. 1-92. Nisbett, R. and Ross, L. (1980). *Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgement*. Prentice-Hall. Spence, D. P. (1992). "Interpretation: A Critical Perspective." In J. W. Barron et al (eds.), *Interface of Psychoanalysis and Psychology*, APA, pp. 558-572. Allen Esterson --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
