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.
Psychoanalysts, long accustomed to dealing with the subjective, the intangible, and the irrational in human behavior, have a special interest in the impact of the current anti-science movement on the theory and practice of their specialty.
Opposition to science is not new. It is a recurrent phenomenon, set in historical contexts that give it particular form in each period. The first great efflorescence of science in the Renaissance aroused the ire of the authorities and institutions whose beliefs and powers were being undermined. The specific form of the anti-science movement was rigid enforcement of religious doctrine as epitomized in the well known story of Galileo and the Inquisition. Later, in reaction to the early industrial revolution, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was the target of Swift's bitter satire in Gulliver's Travels. Goldsmith's “Deserted Village” was typical of the nostalgic yearning for the “good old days” of simple pastoral tranquility in the same period. Several decades later Goethe and Schiller inveighed against Newtonian physics while Blake counterposed, visionary mysticism against the impersonal logic of science. The historical setting was the controversy between vitalists and mechanists as the foundations of modern chemistry and biology were being laid. The synthesis of urea in 1828 wrote finis to the scientific controversy, but philosophers continued to wrestle with the contrasting viewpoints of idealism and materialism while the romantic poets extolled the beauties of nature to counterbalance the collection of facts about nature. Psychiatry and psychology were emerging from speculative philosophy as Darwin's theories rekindled the antagonism between science and theology. It was in this context that Freud took up the tradition of Helmholtz and Brücke who had “pledged a solemn oath to put into, effect this truth: no other forces than the common physicochemical ones are active within the organism.”
Science prevailed