Science, Transference and the Unconscious

There is a contradiction at the root of psychoanalysis. While it aims to be a science, it is dedicated to freedom. And since the psychoanalytic process struggles towards such a condition, there is a contradiction in the method as well. It is a process with patterns and predictable moments, but with a gap between them and the freedom towards which it aims. The notions of a causal gap and of freedom challenge the idea that psychoanalysis is a science, but also highlight its prime feature: the notion of an essential contradiction.

I have two aims in this paper. Firstly, I argue that psychoanalysis is built on such a paradox: the unconscious is irrational rather than just unrecognized or repudiated, and the psyche is essentially contradictory or dialectical. Secondly, I aim to show that psychoanalytic method and research are sensitive to the models we choose of the psyche, and that there is always a risk that, the better the model, in the sense of being readily applied, the less it approximates to the dialectical nature of the psyche.

One attempt to dissolve the apparent contradiction at the heart of psychoanalysis is not to notice it - to relegate the contradictory moments to separate, noncommunicating aspects of Freud's mind and of our minds. We attribute his deterministic thinking to nineteenth-century science, displayed in his metapsychological writings; and that on freedom to his clinical work, displayed in his case histories. We then think of ourselves either as scientists or as clinicians.1

The views of nature, of science and of philosophy that were current in Freud's time do not bear out this interpretation. Leading scientific ideas of nature were built on the failure of simple mechanical models, on paradox and on the inadequacy of commonsense. The reductive mechanical approach of the ‘physicalist school’ of the mid-nineteenth century, usually associated with Hermann von Helmholtz, Carl Ludwig, Ernst Brucke and Emil du-Bois Reymond, had given way to a sceptical emp