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Both behavioristic psychology and biological psychiatry have found psychoanalysis' scientific status inferior to their own. In contrast to psychoanalysis both boast of the measurable, statistical character of the data of the psychological laboratory, on the one hand, and the universal character of biochemical law on the other, and by contrast nonobservable impalpable, unempirical character of so many of the concepts of psychoanalytic theory. Those who have confronted this criticism fall into two broad categories. Some, like the existentialists, see no problem at all in conceding that analysis is not a science and ground elsewhere instead. Others, however, insist on seeing it as such and either attempt to prove appearances to the contrary, that it is afterall a science, or else try to show how, with some conceptual overhauling, it can be made into one. Peterfreund belongs to the overhaulers.
He grants the nonscientific character of psychoanalytic theory, and a good portion of the book is devoted to demonstrating this. But his criticisms are not valid, even from the viewpoint of empirical science. His contention that concepts such as psychic energy are not like physical energy, is quite irrelevant. For notions such as neutralization, deneutralization, and metapsychology in general are really theoretical constructs which facilitate the clinical practice of psychotherapy. Metapsychology, then, could be viewed as a kind of short-hand for highly complicated sets of generalizations (if one chose to, one could add about behavior), confirmable or unconfirmable by observation. But Peterfreund mistakenly talks as if the statements of metapsychology had no relationship to reality at all. A recommendation to abandon it for the reasons he gives, would be as ill advised as it would have been to abandon Newtonian physics before Einsteinean physics existed. But based upon this misconception, he proposes to remedy the supposed defect by a computer model of personality. Yet to claim th