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As I enjoyed wrestling with this rich and original paper a dream-like image came to my mind: Scott Taylor has placed science, itself, on the couch. As this body of science experiences being on the couch, it discovers that it has lost the ability to dismiss psychoanalysis as non-scientific because the psychoanalytic method now dwells inside it. The heartbeat of the psychoanalytic method (an observed relationship which provides a setting for dreams, associations, transference, and resistance) gives life to this body. In my response to Taylor, I would like to first touch upon the experience of individuals in psychoanalysis; then I will reflect on Loewald's connection with Thomas Kuhn and psychoanalysis, before finally asking, has psychoanalysis ever been a “normal science”?
We learn that Thomas Kuhn came from a psychoanalytic family. Alfred Adler had analyzed other family members and his mother recommended he try psychoanalysis because he was shy around young women. He found the over two-year experience “interesting as hell,” finished his thesis, and found his first wife. It would seem that his lasting debt to psychoanalysis came from his own experience of resistance, transference, and psychic restructuring which then endured as a heuristic method with which to study the dialectic evolution of science.
As analysts, we listen to Taylor's story of Thomas Kuhn on the couch from the vantage point of our own experience as analysands and analysts. We resonate to the sequence of “normal