John Greenwood (this issue) claims that neglect of an important methodological distinction has contributed directly to the "epistemic impoverishment" of empirical studies of all forms of professional psychotherapy. I challenge this claim, as well as other important claims he makes about the efficacy of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy.

With respect to the reproach by habermas and ricoeur that freud will fall prey to a "scientistic self-misunderstanding" i submit that it was not freud, but these hermeneuticians themselves, who forced the clinical theory of psychoanalysis onto the procrustean bed of a philosophical ideology demonstrably alien to it. as against the generic "disavowal" of causal attributions advocated by some hermeneuticians, i maintain that it is a nihilistic, if not frivolous, trivialization of freud's entire clinical theory. far from serving as a (...) new citadel for psychoanalytic apologetics, the embrace of such hermeneuticians is, i submit, the kiss of death for the legacy that was to be saved. (edited). (shrink)

Adolf Grünbaum contends that he has discovered in Freud's writings a hitherto overlooked thesis (the Tally Argument), enunciated by Freud to underwrite his psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation. (The Foundations of Psycho analysis, 1984:127-72). He claims that until at least 1917, and possibly up to 1926, Freud invoked the unique efficacy of analytic therapy to vindicate the Freudian theory of personality, including the specific aetiologies of the psychoneuroses and the general theory of psychosexual development (Foun dations : 140-1). In this (...) article I shall argue (1) that the Tally Argument itself is defective, and (2) that Freud did not invoke it as Grünbaum claims. In short, I shall argue that Grünbaum's Tally Argument thesis is untenable and, as a corollary, that his depiction of Freud as a 'sophisticated scientific methodologist' is misconceived. (shrink)

This book critically examines Freud's own detailed arguments for his major explanatory and therapeutic principles, the current neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis, and the hermeneuticists' reconstruction of Freud's theory and therapy as an alternative to what they claim was a “scientistic” misconstrual of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The clinical case for Freud's cornerstone theory of repression – the claim that psychic conflict plays a causal role in producing neuroses, dreams, and bungled actions – turns out to be ill-founded for two main reasons: (...) Even if clinical data were valid, the method of free association has failed to support the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious motivation; Clinical data tend in any case to be artifacts of the analyst's self-fulfilling expectations, thus losing much of their evidential value. The hypothesis that psychoanalytic treatment is in reality a placebo poses a serious challenge to the assumption that insight is a key causal factor when therapy is successful. This challenge has yet to be met by psychoanalysts. Similar conclusions undermine the neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis. The most influential hermeneuticists, on the other hand, are shown to have imposed an alien philosophy on psychoanalysis, partly through their reliance on gross misconceptions of the natural sciences. Karl Popper's criticism of the Freudian corpus as empirically untestable has misjudged its evidential weaknesses, which are more subtle. If there exists empirical evidence for the principal psychoanalytic doctrines, it cannot be obtained without well-designed extraclinical studies of a kind that have for the most part yet to be attempted. (shrink)

This book consists thematically of three broad sections: a lengthy introduction in which Grünbaum critically assesses the hermeneutic construal of psychoanalysis, as represented in the work of Habermas, G. S. Klein, and Ricoeur; a critical examination of Popper's assessment of both psychoanalysis and inductivism; and a logical analysis of core psychoanalytic ideas that constitute the foundation for much of psychoanalytic theory. This last section is, in my view, the heart of the book and therefore, it is that section on which (...) I will focus in this review. (shrink)