Kleinian Guilt, Determinism, and Free Will: Implications For Clinical Theory and Treatment

Ever since 20th-century physics challenged and ultimately overthrew the physics of Newton and the methodological ideas on which the science of the Enlightenment was based, contemporary philosophers of science have been scrambling to revise their structural framework for understanding the process of scientific inquiry. Feyerabend (1975, 1981, 1984) among others (e.g., Kuhn, 1970; Polanyi, 1964) has characterized the scientific methodology of the Enlightenment as imposing certain limits on scientific inquiry: “Agreement with observable facts; a stable boundary between object and subject; causal explanations; the laws of classical logic” (Feyerabend, 1984, p. 3). Feyerabend argues that scientists such as Bohr, Boltzmann, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Mach resisted imposing these rules on their work and discovered that at least at a molecular level scientific inquiry can proceed without them. Thus, in modern physics the exact temporal and spatial position of an electron around the nucleus of an atom is indeterminate (uncertain) and, indeed, random (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). Similarly, the physicist's decision about whether to observe an electron as a particle or a wave determines the electron's actual properties (Capra, 1982). These discoveries shook the foundations on which science and its philosophy had been resting for the previous 300 years.

Although emerging as a formal area of scientific inquiry at the same time these dazzling discoveries in modern physics were taking place, psychology remained loyal to an Enlightenment view of scientific inquiry, which included the limits that Feyerabend has identified (cf. Broughton and Zahaykevich, 1983; Howard, 1985). Two of these adopted limits—causal explanations and the laws of classical logic—have profound implications for clinical theory and practice. Unfortunately, a systematic study of the epistemological presuppositions on