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Here is a second book which addresses the current state of psychoanalytic theory and research. Like Carlos Strenger ( Between Science and Hermeneutics, 1992, reviewed this Journal, Vol 38. No. 1), Robert Langs has serious criticisms to make of the lack of critical discipline within the overall field of psychoanalysis, with all its sub-disciplines and rival theories. Like Strenger, he responds to the critiques mounted in the last decade against the scientific viability of psychoanalytic method - in particular he cites those of and . There, the similarities between the two books ends.
Strenger argues against the neurological model Freud proposed in the ‘Project for a scientific psychology’, and for the essentially hermeneutic nature of the analytic process, which, he demonstrates, characterizes the later Freud. He proposes a rigorous research programme to be developed out of recent methodological developments in the study of hermeneutics. For Langs, these later developments, and their evolution into the various sub-disciplines by Klein, by the object-relations school, by the American ego and self-psychology schools - all these developments have served to take psychoanalysis away from its early potential for a truly scientific discipline.
Taking the reader through an abbreviated history and philosophy of science, Langs locates the current practice of psychoanalysis as a discipline within what he calls the Aristotelian tradition - where theory is built upon common-sense observation coupled with ‘averaging’ or typical case kind of demonstration: it is, in short, ‘naturalistic’. Galilean science, which inaugurated modern scientific method, by contrast, relies upon inductive observation of limited cases to develop general explanatory and predictive