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.
Has psychoanalysis become an arcane, myth-ridden pseudo-science whose failure to achieve real scientific progress makes it comparable to medieval alchemy? Donald Spence thinks so; and although invoking the comparison with alchemy might seem like an extravagant analogy, he seems to mean it quite literally. Taking his picture of how alchemy functioned from Foucault, he describes a medieval belief in the doctrine of signatures (or symbols) that enabled the medieval alchemist to uncover an object's true nature by studying the “visible marks for invisible analogies.” A modern psychoanalyst, notes Spence, “works in much the same manner, constantly searching for resemblances and pattern matches and using standard transformations to bridge the gap between two apparently dissimilar examples.” What was wrong with the medieval approach was its reliance on single, paradigmatic examples — similar to our use of Freud's case studies — and a tradition of master — apprentice relationships in which “the rules were taught more by example than explanation.” Spence wants to lay the groundwork for a truly “Galilean” science of psychoanalysis, but laments that because “the stuff of mind is largely out of reach,” we can easily be fooled into confusing our data with our metaphorical descriptions of it. Especially pernicious he feels is the growing theoretical position that the data of psychoanalysis is nothing but our language and its metaphors.
As an example of this unfortunate “rhetorical” trend, he cites Wallerstein, who instead of seeing metaphor “as a temporary expedient, someday to be replaced by something more descriptively apt,” he sees the “different and distinguishing theoretical positions … that mark our psychoanalytic pluralism … as primarily metaphors,” which are “beyond the realm of empirical study and scientific process.” There is a considerable irony here, of course, in the fact that it was Spence himself, in his (1982) Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (for which Wallerst