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Dear Editor,
In a recent submission to the Journal, I put a case against relying too much on neuroscience evidence as if it were evidence for psychoanalysis. The paper was turned down, perhaps for good reasons, but I was invited to submit an idea or two about the way psychoanalysts participate in interdisciplinary debate - or rather the way they do not participate. I am responding to the invitation with this letter.
For some decades psychoanalysis has experienced so-called ‘Freud-bashing’ (e.g. Hook, 1959; Cioffi, 1970; Masson, 1984; Crews, 1993, 1998; Fish, 1989; Webster, 1995; and see Forrester, 1997). But also more cogent criticisms have been turned against psychoanalysis for even longer (Eysenck, 1953; Popper, 1959, Grunbaum, 1984, 1993). Moreover, from the 1970s, serious internal criticism has developed (Kohut, 1971; Fromm, 1971; Atwood and Stolorow, 1984); and at the same time the divergence of object-relations theory in Britain (Klein, 1935, 1946; Winnicott, 1960; Bowlby et al., 1952) away from Freud's psychic energy model, displayed the increasing heterogeneity of psychoanalysts’ commitments. It is not surprising that there has been a tendency to retreat from engagement with criticism, and has resulted in recent years in a search for something that might give psychoanalysis an apparent support from ‘objective’ science.
The relations between psychoanalysis and neuroscience have been varied over the years. It is ironic that in the heyday of psychoanalysis, Karl Pribram (1962; Pribram and Gill, 1976) was keen to recruit psychoanalysis to the new field of neuroscience. The tables have now been turned and contrary to Freud's clear position, psychoanalysts now recruit evidence from the new field of neuroscience. The current search for support has led psychoanalysis to embrace the new neuroscience, as that field has expanded with non-intrusive methods of objective empirical investigation. That a profession manages its anxiety collectively is not implausible (e.g. Eiso