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The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis is an ambitious, often powerful, but ultimately unsatisfactory critique of psychoanalysis. It is a telling detail that the blurb of this book should describe its American author, Donald P. Spence, as ‘Professor of Psychiatry’ without referring to the fact that he is also a psychoanalyst.
Spence views contemporary psychoanalysis as a monolithic body of theory and practice and assumes that nothing has substantially changed in the analytic world since its early days. He feels therefore free to use repeated attacks on Freud - his discovery of the Oedipus complex (‘a tragedy’), his use of metaphors, his self-analysis (‘a legend’) and his (‘misleading’) case histories - to undermine psychoanalysis as it is practised today. This seems an unfair approach as the claim of a ‘troubling lack of progress’ (p. 1) in analytic theory and technique remains unsubstantiated. The same applies to the statement that ‘once Freud had made up his mind, he was unusually resistant to changing it’ (pp. 104-105), while in fact Freud repeatedly reviewed his own metapsychology, e.g. by abandoning the seduction hypothesis, postulating the death drive, replacing the topographical with the structural model and introducing a new theory of anxiety.
Spence sees psychoanalysis as being committed to an in-depth study of individual specimen - be they the dream of the botanical monograph in Die Traumdeutung or the clinical case of Dora - following the Aristotelian conceptualist model, as well as the Romantic idealisation of the explorer of far-away lands and the archaeologist of deep-buried cities. This tendency is contrasted by Spence with the more respectable Baconian and Galilean traditions, prevalent in modern natural sciences, that favour strictly observed empirical methodologies involving quantitative research, controlled experiments, the build-up of a database of records and consensual validation.
The problem is the author's own ambiguous position in relation to t