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September 11, 1986
Michael Basch takes strong objection to my statement that Heinz Kohut and the self psychology school "insist that the methods of psychoanalysis are those of intuition, introspection, and empathy," but he reserves his dudgeon only for my having linked intuition with introspection and empathy. I accept the correction that Kohut did not use the word "intuition" in describing his method, and that he went to some length to distinguish empathy from intuition. But my acceptance of this correction in no way invalidates the points I made in my article.
I argued that if one limits the psychoanalytic enterprise to the methods of introspection and empathy (I omit here the term "intuition," with no change in the argument), one eliminates the possibility to confirm or disconfirm most of its assertions. While I may have been textually incorrect in coupling empathy and introspection with intuition, I believe the logic of my argument is correct. By claiming introspection and empathy as the exclusive psychoanalytic methods, Kohut placed psychoanalysis squarely with the hermeneutic movement. In his view, and presumably in Basch's as well, psychoanalysis