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Periodic attempts have been made by various philosophers to show that psychoanalysis is either valid or invalid. They may be interested in the theory of mind, or the puzzle of mind-body relations, or consciousness, or person-hood, or the nature and limits of scientific enquiry, or the hermeneutic nature of knowledge. We clinicians generally react by bending lower over our lasts.
Lavinia Gomez has bravely taken on the task of trying to compare three philosophers' views of the epistemological basis of psychoanalysis. She bases her selection on one of the Freud Wars, a series of skirmishes which break out periodically in the New York Review of Books. This particular skirmish was begun in 1993 by Frederick Crews, a professor of literature who dismissed psychoanalysis as a vast con trick, supporting his criticisms by the work of Adolf Grunbaum, a philosopher of science, who considered psychoanalysis to be nonscientific. Thomas Nagel, amongst others, contributed to the debate. Nagel argued that psychoanalysis is a successful empirical science, which has transformed our view of what a person is. Neither Nagel nor Grunbaum considered whether or not psychoanalysis should be classified as a science, whereas Jürgen Habermas considered it not to be a science, but a hermeneutic endeavour.
The second part of the book can be simply described. It consists of three excerpts from the work of these philosophers. Adolf Grunbaum's ‘Critique of psychoanalysis’ from The Freud Encyclopaedia of 2002; Thomas Nagel's ‘Freud's permanent revolution’, a 1994 review in the New York Review of Books of a book by Richard Wollheim, with an addendum which is his riposte to Grunbaum's reply to his review; and Jürgen Habermas' ‘The scientistic self-misunderstanding of metapsychology: on the logic of general interpretation’, which is a chapter taken from his Knowledge and Human Interests of 1971. Whilst all three papers are interesting, and well chosen from the point of view of showing the structure of the