Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

We would like to thank Nathan Szajnberg for his letter and review of our paper, “Scientific thinking styles: The different ways of thinking in psychoanalytic case studies” (IJP volume 101, issue 5, 2020). We have read their suggestions with great interest and would like to respond to some of the comments.

The author suggests several works that would be relevant for our research on scientific thinking styles. In this response, we will focus on Ricoeur’s work, specifically his paper “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings” (1977), which the author described as complementary to our paper and essential to the debates on scientific thinking in psychoanalysis. In our view, there are several important things to keep in mind when comparing Ricoeur’s stance on proof in psychoanalytic writing and our epistemic discussion of scientific thinking as a whole.

First, Ricoeur commits to the argument that psychoanalysis “has never quite succeeded” (1977, 835) in demonstrating how different knowledge claims are produced, developed and justified, i.e. how an observation “from the couch” is transformed into a “valid statement” in psychoanalytic theory. It is clear from our paper that we do not share Ricoeur’s view that psychoanalysis has failed to show how it develops, validates or (self-) authenticates its theoretical assertions. In our paper, we referred to several classic Freudian cases (Schreber (Freud, 1911), “A child is being beaten”) (Freud, 1924) and other works that include case-based thinking (such as “The Interpretation of Dreams”) (Freud, 1900) to show that, despite fierce criticisms, there are clear traces of Freud’s scientific thinking as well as attempts (this is a key word here; please see further comments) to authenticate knowledge claims. For example, Freud’s case of Schreber follows a very specific thinking pattern: he moved from Schreber as a single instance of paranoia to paranoia as a clinical type, a theory that can inform clinicians a