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I want to thank the Freud Museum and the British Journal of Psychotherapy for putting together such a timely conference. Recent attacks on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have invariably raised the question of the scientific credibility of psychoanalysis, a charge that is so clouded over by an ignorance of science that it hs been difficult to formulate an adequate response. I have been particularly struck by the spectacle of novelists like Fay Weldon and literary critics like Frederick Crews confidently accusing psychoanalysis of being unscientific without their giving any evidence that they know anything at all about science.
Nevertheless the charge seems to stick. We all seem to believe at some level that psychoanalysis may not be scientific in the usual way but …. Following the ‘but’ are a number of responses: but psychoanalysis is valid in its own right; but psychoanalysis is trying to become more scientific by doing controlled studies; but psychoanalysis is an hermeneutic art and not a science at all and it is just not fair to judge it by the strict standards of science.
All these responses accept uncritically a notion of a science that is objective, precise and, above all, certain. Such a science is a mythic science, not a real science, a myth that originated with the formation of the Royal Society in 1660 following the Restoration and that became consolidated in the late 19th century with the public relations activities of the Movement for the Endowment of Research in Britain and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the United States.
There is a dual aspect of science, long known to working scientists. There is a set of actual practices and bodies of knowledge that bring us into more intimate engagement with the natural world. And there is a set of social representations of science, an ideology of science, which in these debates is frequently called a positivist view of science. When Fay Weldon calls psychoanalysis unscientific