Discussion

Rosemarygordon London

Stein's aim in writing this paper has been, so it seems to me, to present us with an epistemology of scientific discovery and then to suggest how this might be applied to concepts and research in analytical psychology.

His paper re-emphasizes the value of making explicit those principles and beliefs upon which may rest both our theories and our practice but which have, for one reason or another, remained implicit, unformulated, and unspoken. Making principles explicit can help us to formulate ever more valid and consistent conceptual schemata; it can facilitate communication between ourselves and possibly with people working in other disciplines; it is also likely to affect our way of dealing with patients by making us less prone to influence them unwittingly.

I should like to say something about the word ‘empirical’, because Stein takes issue with those who claim that analytical psychology is an ‘empirical’ science or that Jung was an ‘empiricist’. If Stein refers here to the philosophical school of empiricism, that is the school of Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, who proposed that all the knowledge we possess has come to us through the senses, because we start life with a tabula rasa, then he is right in stating that analytical psychology is not empirical. If, however, the term ‘empirical’ is used to indicate an attitude to facts, then I would dispute it. To assess whether any particular scientist is empirical or not I should want to ask: What is this scientist's primary goal? Is it the discovery of facts or is it the defence or the assertion of some particular theory? Has he set up his experiment and guided his observations in such a way that not only proof but also disproof is possible? Is he willing to risk the possibility that his ‘beautiful’ theories might be destroyed by ‘horrible’ facts? If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’ then I consider such a man an empiricist.

But to take up now quite another point. I have often bee