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If psychoanalysts are to be condemned as dishonest by Popper's standards, must not Newtonians be similarly condemned?
During the century since the inception of psychoanalysis, philosopher critics have assailed its unscientific character and proposed remedial strategies. Customarily, they focus on Freud, accepting his vision of psychoanalysis as a biomedical science. In arguing abstractly for greater rigor in the handling of clinical data, they (e.g., Grünbaum, 1984) thereby fail to deal concretely with the clinical inadequacies and errors of Freud and his disciples, while simultaneously ignoring the great transformations since that early era. Consequently, they do not perceive that their remedial strategies for psychoanalysis are premised on faulty logic and an erroneous image of productive science; nor do they perceive the grounds on which psychoanalytic progress has been occurring (or failing to occur). The result is that they misdirect attention from those areas of psychoanalysis that badly need reformative measures. The rival hermeneutic approach to psychoanalysis has basic virtues but suffers its own limitations, for psychoanalysis does have a significant cognitive (“scientific”) base. Integral to psychoanalysis are issues of ethics, aesthetics, and science, and these must all be encompassed in a critical vision, so that it must be studied and judged as a normative science and art.
Psychoanalysis is clinically small, theoretically huge. Clinically, it is anchored in the nuclear dyad of analyst and analysand. On the other hand, as a theoretical system it has manifold relevance: