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In the wake of Thomas Kuhn's 1962 publication The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the scientific discipline was forced to rethink not only the way it handles research but the greater history of science itself. In the psychoanalytic discipline, many scholars have made use of Kuhn's work to justify shifts in psychoanalytic traditions (Knight, 1985; Mitchell, 1993; Forrester, 2007; Elad-Strenger, 2013). However, few have attempted to point out the relation between Kuhnian science and the psychoanalytic process. Before Kuhn and his descriptions of anomalies and crises that bring about paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions, there were the necessary developmental crises and eventual ego restructurings of the psyche given to us by psychoanalytic psychology. In the discussion that follows we will learn how psychoanalysis, through Kuhn's own psychoanalytic treatment, revolutionized science.
For Thomas Kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions consists of developmental pattern of normal science, an influx of anomalies, a crisis in normal science, and a resulting paradigm shift. During periods of normal science, great strides are made because questions related to the first principles from which the science bases its inquiries are settled, and as a result all phenomena contrary to the established norms are ignored. Kuhn (1962) calls the phase in which normal science is conducted without questions to its foundations or first principles a period of puzzle-solving. The foundation of normal science, as a basic set of concepts and experimental practices, serves as an exemplar or paradigm to successful puzzle-solving (Kuhn, 1962).