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Validation of psychoanalytic theory by interdisciplinary studies is an acceptable exercise. Unfortunately, this book does not succeed in its purpose. The authors are academic psychologists who claim that Freudian theory has never been adequately tested along interdisciplinary lines and is to be criticized for maintaining Freud's position that the actual conduct of a psychoanalysis is the only way its theory can be tested. They regard this approach as fallacious because of the built-in errors of the analytic situation (countertransference distortion, the analyst's personal stake in understanding the patient's statements as fitting his theoretical expectations and biases, and inaccuracies in reproducing the content of sessions). They feel that the psychoanalytic establishment has not recognized its scientific weaknesses and has encouraged dogmatism by avoidance of proper validation studies.
Whatever changes have occurred have not been the result of scientific weeding but of political shifts in the psychoanalytic power structure. Therefore it would appear to them that the death instinct theory has been officially deleted from party dogma.
While it is necessary to subject psychoanalytic theory to scientific evaluation and criticism, the approach of Robert Holt, in his introduction to the Freud abstracts, is preferred. He sees Freud's theoretical formulations as partial truths, set down to serve a purpose and constantly subject to change as time and experience provide new data or better perspectives for drawing conclusions. The body of knowledge so accumulated is a historical documentation carrying within it the seeds of change.
Setting this aside, the authors make a commendable effort to validate theory by what appears to be an exhaustive search of the literature. There are approximately 2,000 references. Certain Freudian paradigms are reduced to testable hypotheses and the literature (almost exclusively psychological) is reviewed for validation studies. The effo