Psychoanalysis and Science: The Concept of Structure

Some fields of science, such as molecular biology and high-energy physics are moving ahead very rapidly, while others, including psychoanalysis, are not. Slower progress is not necessarily due to the complexity of the subject matter or the difficulties of learning or teaching it, since advances seem to come from those fields demanding a high level of intellectual activity. It is significant, too, that we are perhaps better acquainted with the political, economic, and social possibilities and consequences of nuclear theory and research than with its relevance for theory construction. Yet to find the object of scientific knowledge we must go to its theoretical assumptions.

My concern here is not with the success of psychoanalysis as it is practiced but rather with the problems of formalism: what this science means and what it implies. Although today scientific truths can be tested by experience, the Greeks, in contrast, presupposed the existence of a definitive, all-embracing idea which would serve to explain all observable phenomena. But the results of modern science do not lead me to believe that this is possible, now or in the future. We think, we work, and we discover new phenomena. But what we find tomorrow will not necessarily fit in with our current theoretical constructs. In a beautiful paper, “The Need for New Knowledge,” Oppenheimer (1959) discussed the fact that new knowledge opens up endless choices and is ennobling in its union of simplicity and truth. But though such new knowledge generally also engenders fear or anxiety, hope, suspicion, and cynicism, we see in the recent Symposium on Basic Research, of which Oppenheimer's paper was a part, how a group of most distinguished scientists bravely refused to confine their interest to any one area of man's creative life. In essence it seems to me that a psychoanalyst, if he is to be a scientist, must be a person who is not only involved but