The Future of an Empirical Psychoanalysis'

There are many big questions for which fortunately we do not feel compelled to find answers. What caused the French Revolution? Is there an afterlife? I categorize into this family: ‘Is psychoanalysis a science?’ The category may be designated as questions for people with too much leisure time, formulated in an inherently unproductive mould.

Yet psychoanalysts seem to care what the appropriate answer to the question might be. A more interesting question would be, why should they care? We care because science brings credibility. As Paul Meehl (1995) put it, ‘science has the best attested knowledge claims’ in our culture. Objective, trustworthy knowledge which most closely approximates what people regard as ‘true’ or ‘real’. Many disciplines make such claims including theology, metaphysics, politics, literary criticism, philosophy, journalism, aesthetics, but scientific observations are simply taken more seriously than claims from any of these other domains. That this is indisputably so is marked by our language: ‘scientifically speaking’ sounds compelling (whereas ‘journalistically speaking’ somehow does not carry the same implication).

Why should people regard science as a preferred route to knowledge? The answer might be in the methods that scientists use, perhaps embodied in guidelines rather than in principles. Amongst the key features are an attitude of scepticism, the repeatability of observations and, often, that these should be accessible to mathematical and statistical tools.

It is clear that clinical psychoanalysis falls far short of such desiderata. For example, there is no coherent set of principles that could define psychoanalysis as a singular treatment, which is the minimum requirement for replicability. Even in Glover's (1940, unpublished) survey of psychoanalytic technique in the 1930s, the heterogeneity of psychoanalytic technique was very evident and, as we know, matters have not improved since. In fact, a relatively easily