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This is an eminently readable and significant contribution to the contemporary enterprise of reassessing psychoanalysis both as a treatment method and as a theory, or rather, as the authors put it, a collection of loosely linked minitheories. Consequently, it merits a thorough review.
As the title so poignantly suggests, the book's significance lies primarily in its being a scientific reappraisal of Freud's work. This contrasts sharply with Holt's Freud Reappraised (1989), in which Holt dismisses empirical attempts to test and verify Freud's theory as “mixed and spotty” (p. 340). I am surprised that Holt actually wrote that, given the fact that a sizeable and scientifically sound body of research on unconscious mental processes, some of it by the late George S. Klein and myself, was carried out at a time when both he and Klein were codirectors of New York University's Research Center for Mental Health. In this book, aptly titled Freud Scientifically Reappraised, the authors take issue with Holt and others who share his jaundiced view of efforts to test and validate psychoanalytic theories scientifically. The authors caution not to be “superperfectionistic” in demanding a level of excellence rarely found anywhere else in the behavioral science literature. They point out that over 2,500 empirical studies of Freud's theories have been carried out up to now, and that even though they obviously vary in quality,
they compare well with the accumulated studies relevant to any other major area of psychology. It is clearly not true that there is a lack of research investment in what Freud had to say (p. 286).… If there is anything unique about our enterprise, it is that we were determined to appraise Freud's work on the basis of controlled observation rather than philosophical or theoretical paradigms. All too often, the unending commentaries in the literature concerning the soundness of Freud's ideas are based on speculative preferences for this or that methodological approach