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The philosopher of science, Adolf Grünbaum's Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis is a major sequel to his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique . In both books, he attacks three main targets: the hermeneutic philosophers, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur; Karl Popper; and Freud.
Habermas accused Freud of ‘scientific self-misunderstanding’ in claiming scientific status for psychoanalysis. Grünbaum retaliates from the basis of his profound knowledge of modern physics and says that Habermas is a scientific illiterate, who has tried to down-grade psychoanalysis from a science to the humanities by falsely claiming that it is acausal.
Ricoeur's main thesis is that psychoanalysis is not a science but a language - ‘a semantics of desire’. In particular, he views neurotic symptoms, slips, and dream products as elements in a language that convey ‘meaning’. Grünbaum has no time for Ricoeur's linguistics and says that Freud was not concerned with this kind of ‘meaning’ but with how the meaning of symptoms is derived from ‘define causal origins’. He dismisses both philosophers as unworthy critics of Freud and, for obvious reasons, is keen to demolish this line of intellectual defeatism as it would render redundant his critique of psychoanalysis as a science.
Grünbaum's second target is Karl Popper's declaration that psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science because it is a catch-all that can explain every state of affairs. In this way. Popper claims it is immune to contradictory evidence and to being tested by his own rigorous method of falsifiability. Instead, it can only pass the less rigorous inductive verifiable testing of reasoning from observable data.
But, replies the neo-Baconian inductivist, Grünbaum, there are many propositions in psychoanalysis that can be falsified, e.g. Freud's theory of paranoia that sees it as a defence against active homosexuality. Grünbaum suggests that an epidemiology carri