The Kayatakins have written a thoughtful review of the thesis of our article “Science Needs Criticisms: Debating the Clinical Aspects of Diverging Theoretical Schools,” which was in turn stimulated by Psychoanalytic Review's policy of refusing to publish critiques of its published papers. This position registered as “unscientific” and antithetical to those of major medical journals. And it was interpreted by the Kayatkins as a metaphor for the closed theoretical systems of psychoanalysis, not only in its publications but in its organization.
They elegantly segue from the history of exclusion (of Bowlby, the Kleinians, Kohutians and Jungians) to an analysis of the proposed origin in Freud's pragmatic need to abandon scientific research and a career as a professor for marriage and clinical practice, a second-class career. The pressure to define psychoanalysis as a science is therefore reparative of the loss.
The authors then transform the criticism of the original paper's plea for the freedom to evaluate disparate theoretical postures into a discussion of “science or not” in psychoanalysis based on Freud and his followers need to create a science—not quite our point. While appearing to accept the need for such critiques in a science, they criticize Schachter, Schachter and Kaechele for their narrow definition, although the latter had never claimed that their speculation was more “scientific” than the author they were criticizing. They only claimed that science demands that well-formulated criticism is essential to any science and that their critique should be published within the usual rules of propriety.
Indeed, they join the Kayatekins in their criticism of single case studies as well as their further afield examples of “evidence-based treatments in psychiatry.” A straw man is constructed however, when they say “that ‘science’ is not the ultimate and most powerful source of information.” All
information must be reviewable and on examination must satisfy standards of validity and replicability to be considered “scientific.” Criticism is the path to elucidating that result.