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Empirical research and psychoanalysis have not been comfortable bedfellows. The tone was set by Freud in his summary dismissal of Rosenzweig's experiments as ‘unnecessary’, contemptuously adding ‘Still, it can do no harm’ (Gay 1998). Various reasons have been advanced for Freud's hostility, including the indifference, if not antipathy, with which his ideas were originally received by the academic world. More often, however, it is the purported irrelevance or inapplicability of empirical science that is cited. This science, it is contended, deals with cause and effect. By contrast, psychoanalysis concerns meaning and is a matter of hermeneutics; any attempt to understand psyche from the perspective of the science of mathematics and logic must, therefore, be by definition profoundly mistaken in so far as it involves a fundamental category error: the confusion of the world of meaning and symbols with the world of signs and information (Meltzer 1986).
Taylor takes as his starting point this dichotomy or rather what he views as the dichotomization of these positions. Using the figures of John Keats and Sir Francis Bacon, who have acquired the status of personifying them, he explores how far they are really as polarized as they are supposed to be. Following Bion, analysts have widely drawn upon Keats's idea of negative capability to develop and illuminate an important and arguably defining aspect of what Schaffer calls the ‘analytic attitude’ (Schaffer 1983); the capacity to develop and maintain an open mind and eschew premature or precipitate judgements about the meaning or nature of patients’ material. This setting aside of ‘memory and desire’ (Bion 1967) or of ‘knowing beforehand’ (Fordham 1993) is, of course, a direct development of Freud's concepts of ‘free association’ and the analyst's ‘evenly-suspended attention’ (Freud 1911).
Taylor describes how this approach to the field of analysts’ investigations has been contrasted with that of empirical science outlined by an