The Psychoanalysis of Science: the Role of Metaphor Paraprax, Lacunae and Myth. By Yehoyakim Stein. Brighton:  Sussex Academic Press, 2005,  vii + 190 pp., $67.50.

When psychoanalysis is applied to art, it aims to uncover something about a particular work or artistic oeuvre. Alternatively, it seeks to reveal something about the creative impulse that gave rise to it. The application of psychoanalysis to science poses a very different set of issues, and though the topic is intriguing, one wonders whether in this book Yehoyakim Stein has embarked on a route hitherto little traveled (if ever) for at least one very good reason. In a word, psychoanalysis is, phenomenologically speaking, the analysis of the psyche. Hence, the all too often repeated criticism of the application of psychoanalytic thinking to art—namely, that there is no live input from the artist, nothing comparable to the freely associative mind of a patient that is the sine qua non of the analytic endeavor. Yet art, unlike science, makes no claim to objectivity, and that is precisely where the fault line of the psychoanalysis of science may well reside.

Stein addresses the difficulty head on: he makes the claim from the start that science is more subjective than it knows itself to be, that it is both driven by unconscious motivations and hindered in its development by blind spots and lacunae of various kinds. So far the question of the application of psychoanalysis to science would appear credible. After all, there is creativity in science, and creativity is necessarily subjective. Though well substantiated and articulately drawn, however, the