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 philosophical literature on psychoanalysis has often been vitiated by a central defect. Authors like Popper have condemned psychoanalysis as unscientific in order to illustrate the strength of their views about the nature of scientific theories in general. Others have endorsed it as a paradigm for some general thesis, e.g. the existence of a schism between the natural sciences and the humanities. It is the rare philosopher who has bothered to examine psychoanalytic theory in detail, without many preconceptions, to find out to what extent it has a sound epistemic foundation.
In his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Adolf Grünbaum—the well-known philosopher of science—has taken up this task in an impressive way. He displays a remarkable knowledge of psychoanalytic literature and his arguments are lucid and well documented, which allows for fruitful discussion and critique. He has a clear question in mind and in this book pursues it relentlessly through almost three hundred pages. Psychoanalysts generally claim that the best, if not the only, way to investigate the truth of psychoanalytic theory is the setting of analytic treatment, and Grünbaum wants to find out whether this method is capable of providing valid confirmation for the theory.
After detailed analysis, Grünbaum comes up with a negative answer. He claims to have shown that it is impossible to make sure that the data obtained in the analytic situation are uncontaminated, i.e. not the result of suggestion. Further, he contends that there is no way to prove, within the setting of analytic therapy, that its therapeutic results are not due to a placebo effect. Therefore, he argues, clinical work cannot in itself provide the foundation for accepting psychoanalytic theory.
It is important not to misread Grünbaum as stating that psychoanalysis is wrong. Its truth—he believes—is an empirical question not to be settled by philosophical analysis. All he claims is that the truth value of the theory cannot