You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THE ISSUE OUR PANEL IS CONSIDERING today is central to the way we think about psychoanalysis, both clinically and as an intellectual
discipline. To begin with the latter, it strikes me that although our work puts us in a unique position to observe human lives in depth and to learn from what we have seen, as a group we are plagued by a deep uncertainty. The self-doubts are reinforced by our isolation from the academic mainstream; as a result, we are unusually vulnerable to attacks on our credibility, even when they are patently opportunistic. Recently, we have even come close to a discipline-wide intellectual panic, the "catastrophic reaction" that greeted Adolf Grünbaum's (1984) flamboyant and ultimately rather trivial attack on the validity of psychoanalytic propositions.
Because of this, we often hear that it is urgent for us to coordinate psychoanalytic observations and hypotheses with those of so-called "adjacent" disciplines. Many analysts seem to think that we can bootleg a measure of legitimacy if our findings agree with those of the neurologists, or the anthropologists, or, most recently, the developmental psychologists. In contrast, I feel a certain amount of skepticism; I suspect that we can stand on our own as a discipline, without deferring and without conceding that our findings are contingent upon those that come from other fields or that grow out of other observational methods.
Accordingly, I bristle at comments like this one from Daniel Stern contrasting the value of psychoanalytic and direct child observation:
The current scientific Zeitgeist has a certain persuasive and legitimizing force in determining what is a reasonable view of things. And at this moment the Zeitgeist favors observational methods. … As related fields, presumably about the same subj