You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I would like to offer a brief reply to Joseph Schwartz's paper ‘Is physics a good model for psychoanalysis? Reflections on Langs and Badalamenti’ (British Journal of Psychotherapy 11(4), pp. 594-600). Schwartz's paper is itself a contribution to a series of papers discussing the work of Langs and Badalamenti (Burgoyne 1994; Harris 1994; Langs & Badalamenti 1994a, 1994b). All too often contentious contributions to the psychotherapeutic literature are politely ignored (I use ‘psychotherapy’ as a generic term inclusive of psychoanalysis). It is refreshing to find that intense and sustained scientific and philosophical debate is encouraged within the pages of this Journal.
Schwartz critizes Langs and Badalamenti on several fronts. Roughly half of Schwartz's paper is taken up with technical comments on their handling of models derived from physics (and applied to psychoanalytic data). Schwartz, a physicist by training, is well equipped to discuss such issues whereas I, in my ignorance of mathematics and physics, am not. I will therefore refrain from commenting on these elements of his paper. Schwartz also provides some ad hominem criticism and some reflections on the issue of the scientificity of psychoanalysis, the latter of which will be my main concern.
On the ad hominem front, Schwartz objects to what he calls the flamboyant and unrestrained tone of Langs and Badalamenti's paper. This is fine as an expression of Schwartz's impatience but carries little cognitive significance. The style and tone of a paper have no intrinsic relationship to the value of its content. In fairness, Schwartz seems to concede this point.
On the philosophical front, Schwartz claims, without any presentation of evidence or any gesture towards providing any supporting argument, that:
For me Langs seems to reify the unconscious - to turn a mental process, the unconscious, into a thing - while at the same time his technique seems to me to have the danger of leaving the client isolated and in an anxi