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Thoughtful, balanced and carefully articulated, this work displays scholarship in depth and breadth relevant to its subject matter. Dr. Rubovits-Seitz gives us the results of thirty-two years of study and reflection since his first, widely cited and classical, paper on the problems of achieving consensus in psychoanalytic interpretation. He began, then, by participating in an important ‘hands on’ research project in analysis. His discussions and conclusions in this book benefit from knowing firsthand the problems of psychoanalytic research about interpretations.
Theories of methodology and of epistomology in psychoanalysis can be dry work. But his very first chapter is anything but. Entitling it ‘Trouble at the Source: Freud's Methodological Conflict’, the author gives detailed documentation that Freud avoided addressing the problems of interpretation because these problems stirred up conflict for him with regard to his positivist scientific ideals. This serves as an introduction to what follows: a broad scholarly review of the shift in science and in psychoanalysis, from positivist to post-positivist points of view, and the many branching aspects of this shift. He demonstrates how the preponderance of writers in psychoanalysis have not successfully incorporated this broad shift in the epistomology of science into their approaches to depth psychological understanding.
Following this first section entitled ‘Historical Background’, he turns to ‘Contemporary Approaches’, expressing lucidly in Chapter 3 his own point of view: if a given set of ideas or explanatory hypotheses is more revealing or helpful than any other considered, this constitutes a sufficient and perhaps the only valid justification for endorsing these hypotheses. He offers this view as he describes ‘assertorial’ or ‘assertoric’ knowledge—essentially knowledge which claims to explain things in a useful way. He cites Poincaré's statement that in mathematics ‘problems are not solved once and for all; they a