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Robert Hinshelwood’s new book is a valuable contribution to the debates concerning the scientific status of psychoanalysis and about how psychoanalytic theories can find a rational justification. Hinshelwood’s primary interest is in the validity of psychoanalytic theories of the mind, not in the ‘evidence-based’ measures of treatment outcome, which now receive most attention. He has concerns about the proliferation of psychoanalytic theories and about the difficulty in selecting between competing theories in the way that he believes natural science does much more successfully. He describes the present situation where there are overlapping and ill-defined psychoanalytic theories, clustered in different schools and followings, with little capacity for resolution of differences, as a Tower of Babel. In this view, Hinshelwood is taking up concerns previously set out in studies of psychoanalytic practice for example by Robert Wallerstein (2005) and David Tuckett (2005). His book proposes a critical procedure by which competing theories can be subjected to decisive empirical test.
Hinshelwood believes that the fundamental critique of psychoanalysis first advanced by Karl Popper (1963) and developed by Adolf Grünbaum (1974, 1993) has never been adequately refuted. He accepts as an essentially valid model of scientific procedure Popper’s ‘hypothetico-deductive method’, originally set out in The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1935. According to this, scientific theories set out generalisations, or universal laws, which are subjected to the test of empirical falsification through controlled experiments or observations. This model contrasts with the ‘inductive method’ according to which knowledge is advanced through the accumulation of positive evidence for theories, which Popper believed cannot generate scientific knowledge. Popper attacked as ‘pseudo-sciences’ those theoretical systems, notably Marxism and psychoanalysis, which pretended to the status of a science but fail