Many thanks to Dr. Poster and Dr. Conci for their erudite discussions of my paper and my book, The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof. I would like to correct a few misimpressions which their discussions may have inadvertently created. Dr. Poster amends my account of the marginalization of psychoanalysis by noting that “the reasons for this [marginalization] are much more complex than Freud's personality defects.” I could not agree more. While my book focuses on resistances within the field, it also acknowledges the significance of external obstacles to the public validation of psychoanalysis, including critics' resistances, anti-Semitism, and the influence of the drug and insurance industries. More than half my book looks beyond Freud to the widespread phenomenon of aversion to proof in the field of psychoanalysis at large. Proof aversion is not a “defect” belonging to any one individual but a general species of defense mechanism triggered by the task of public demonstration of psychoanalytic ideas.
Dr. Conci suggests that I am pessimistic about the future of psychoanalysis. I would put it more narrowly, but more strongly: those quarters of psychoanalysis that continue to shrink so resolutely from the task of public validation have invited their own extinction. As I state in my book, however, “The 21st century could be a good one for psychoanalysis.” I devote considerable space to the many past and current thinkers—from Jacob Arlow to Mark Solms and many, many others—who have assisted in the public validation of psychoanalysis. Despite Freud's bouts of proof aversion, no one did more to explain and validate psychoanalysis, of course, than the founder himself. A diagnosis of proof aversion is in other words not a death sentence. I also devote one of four major sections of my book to the future of psychoanalysis, and include detailed, practical ideas for overcoming proof aversion in the psychoanalytic community.
On the other hand, I won't dispute Poster and Conci's observation that I fail to distinguish between various forms of proof—clinical research versus experiment, as Conci puts it, or as Poster delineates it, “idiographic” versus “nomothetic” research. Without a doubt, individual case studies are critically important to the validation of psychoanalytic ideas and remain relevant to many other disciplines, even in an age that's infatuated with statistics to a fault. I sympathize with psychoanalysts' objections to rote methods when it comes to studying a phenomenon so complex and elusive as the psyche. I would question, however, how much is really gained by making categorical distinctions between research methods. The premise behind such compartmentalized methodology is that the psyche cannot be studied from all angles like other phenomena. The end result of such compartmentalized methodology has generally been to rule out and avoid new approaches to validation and to justify and preserve old ones, or to insist that validation is a private affair among psychoanalysts, not a public goal. Why not instead treat case studies and experiments as mutually compatible strategies for psychoanalytic fact-finding and public validation? In other words, why not think in terms of “both/and” instead of “either/or”?