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August 5, 1985
Spence's paper, "When Interpretation Masquerades as Explanation" (This Journal, 34[1]) makes even clearer what the conclusion of his book on Narrative Truth and Historical Truth implies: that he is not content with interpretive understanding. Indeed, he retains a hope for a science of the mind and aims to create conditions under which we could still salvage explanation. Spence now turns to what he sees as the main obstacle to explanation: the inadequacy of our clinical evidence as a basis for explanation. The alternatives he presents—either we establish replicability in our data or admit that our knowledge is idiosyncratic and random—implicitly reaffirm the scientific criteria of truth. Thus, a contradiction arises between the platform from which Spence makes his criticisms and the one from which he offers solutions.
In his current paper, Spence reviews the idea of narrative coherence as a form of esthetic truth for psychoanalysis from the standpoint of scientific criteria. He points out that in the presentation of case material, narrative fit may be used to suggest that the analyst has provided an explanation of the data where he has merely organized it. A rhetorically powerful narration—as exemplified by the Dora case—can create the impression that one has found the cause of symptoms, identified the links between past events or fantasies and current ones. His suggestion for improvement focuses on the idea of replicability and conviction created by expanded evidence. He advocates a distinction between the criteria of psychoanalytic knowledge as