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Dear Book Reviews Editor
I am pleased to accept David Smith's invitation consequent to my letter in the Autumn 1994 issue of the Journal (VoL 11(1)). For, both his appreciative review of Adolf Grunbaum's ‘Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (British Journal of Psychotherapy 10(3), ) and my subsequent (more anguished than intemperate) response raise vitally important, persistent questions for psychoanalysis/psychotherapy and their practitioners. Is psychoanalysis a valid scientific (perhaps more accurately, quasi-scientific) endeavour sufficiently amenable to the focused scrutiny of a philosopher of science like Grunbaum? Or is it, fundamentally, a human, i.e. interpretive-historical, science which, though intellectually disciplined, is not rigorous by virtue of its restless, ‘lawless’ subject matter (the human being/the human mind) (Abelson 1989).
To quote the psychoanalyst Alfred Margulies (1989): ‘How does one begin to approximate the inner experience of another?’. This perennial problem surely must exercise the minds and hearts of psychotherapists who during their clinical work utilise and test out tentative hypotheses about human experience and functioning to try and answer that question, and revise or modulate or indeed discard their interventions (interpretations) in light of their patients’ responses or lack of response. In fact there is