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The experimental method is concerned only with the search for objective truths, not with any search for subjective truths … The greatest truths, indeed, are at bottom simply a feeling in our mind; that is what Descartes meant by his famous aphorism.
Art is I; Science is We.
The word Science in the title of this conference appears in single inverted commas. We are at once alerted to an ambiguity about this word which the conference organizers seem to share. To be sure the word science strictly means knowledge, no more, no less. However that may be, everyone knows it is bandied about as an euphemism for much else. Science is an activity pursued by people called scientists. It is a professional and social group which, at any given time in modern history, determines the credentials of acceptance into the scientific establishment. In the last half century, certainly within medicine, it has come to mean measurement. Here and there it is not distinguished from technology. For some it is tantamount to a religion, or an anti-religion. It is worshipped, feared, adored and loathed. It is the venue of curiosity, investigation, wonderment and beauty. To others it is the embodiment of ugliness and destruction.
These then are some of the attributes of science as they are of knowledge and, perhaps more to the point, of thought itself. For we know that thinking is hard work, and it is painful. Many would sooner die than think, and sometimes they do just that.
Freud (1927) is similarly ambiguous. In one breath he speaks of ‘our science’ (psychoanalysis). In the same essay he restricts ‘scientific work’ for our knowledge of external reality. Inner, or psychic, reality is, and then again is not, accessible to scientific enquiry. Or so it seems. It is a muddled area.
For the purposes of this conference science predominantly means a scientific community into which psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts are or are not acceptable. And if they are not acceptable, what is to be done about it?