Response

I am pleased to have my long-range version and interpretation of psychoanalytic theory agreed with in its essence and basic principles, and its cumulative details, by a philosopher-analyst who looks at psychoanalytic theorizing from the broad vantage point of the philosophy of science. Not only has Hanly underscored the validity, in his opinion, of the empiricism and the scientific methodology intrinsic to my view of a steadily developing composite theory, but he has contrasted this with the obstructive and deflective effects of the modern, postpositivist, subjectivist approach to theory building. He moreover compares the latter and traces it back to the influence of ancient fifth century B.C. sophistic thinking on early philosophical thought. It is not often that modern theoretical debates enjoy a longitudinal depth of reasoning and insight of such dimension and magnitude. How can I but value and appreciate such a sweeping historical view and confirmation?

Not only does Hanly confirm the solidity of the empirical basis of theory building as I have described it, by emphasizing the bedrock role of observational testing for both confirmation and falsification of existing theory, but he also points to the blurring of such methods by an excessive focus on the limits introduced by the subjectivity of the observer. If Protagoras, whom he quotes, to whom “man is the measure of all things,” is to be followed literally and ultimately, eclecticism and pluralism are to proliferate without control, as man's irreducible subjectivity would “solipsistically confine [each analyst] to his own theory.”

In an essay I wrote in honor of Heinz Hartmann's seventieth birthday (I thought he was ancient then), surveying the scope of Hartmann's lifetime scientific opus, I discovered that at the beginning of his enormous productivity, Hartmann veered off from philosophy into the psychoanalytic way of thinking, moving away from two