Popper and Grünbaum on Scientific Knowledge (J. A. O'Neil's “Popper, Grünbaum, and Induction,” November 1993)

I was particularly pleased to be asked to respond to O'Neil's interesting paper, because I chaired the workshop at the Canadian Scientific meetings at which Dr O'Neil presented it The fundamental importance of his subject to the future of psychoanalysis may not be sufficiently appreciated If it cannot meet the challenge of the Popper/Grunbaum critiques, psychoanalysis will be left in the position of a pastoral psychology from which hermeneutic philosophy cannot save it — since, according to the hermeneutic view, that is its proper destiny.

For a number of reasons, however, I am in disagreement with Dr. O'Neil's position. To avoid Grunbaum's inductivist critique by affirming the correctness of Popper's critique is at best to plunge from the frying pan into the fire. I believe that the best approach to the problem is to meet Grunbaum's challenge head on, since his criticism of psychoanalysis is based upon an inductivism that was inherent in Freud's construction of psychoanalysis and that remains the unavoidable responsibility of any body of knowledge based on observation.

If Popper is correct, psychoanalysis is a pre-scientific mythology of the mind that can never gain scientific status because its hypotheses are untestable clinically Although Popper devotes relatively few pages to Freud compared to his attacks on Plato, Hegel, and Marx, he makes no bones about his belief that psychoanalysis is not a whit more scientific than those metaphysical systems of thought

Psychoanalysis, in Popper's view, is a system of thought based on paranoid logic any fact that could possibly contradict it can be explained