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The cover of Hinshelwood's erudite, provocative and valuable book is both beautiful and instructive: two striking black swans with vivid red beaks on a
tranquil turquoise background, nudging up against the title. That they are beautiful can easily be imagined; that they are instructive requires an understanding of the logic of inductive reasoning, a knowledge of the generally-accepted nature of psychoanalytic proof, and an awareness of why conclusions need to be put to the test. All these things Hinshelwood guides us through, chapter by chapter, as he describes the debates between ‘science’ and ‘hermeneutics’ as to the nature of knowledge, outlines the prevalence of single-case studies in the natural sciences, and constructs carefully a way of testing psychoanalytic understanding through close observation of clinical interactions in the consulting room.
Hinshelwood's objective is bold: to solve the problem that ‘psychoanalysis has a crippling epistemological deficit uncharacteristic of other sciences in that its theories are not subject to verification but must rely upon the point of view and basic assumptions of groups of analysts’ (Hanly 1983, p. 402). In this sense, Hinshelwood is not interested in the current emphasis on outcome research which attempts to make claims about effectiveness of treatments by controlled, large-scale studies that accumulate numerical evidence. He is interested in how psychoanalysis can be seen to be sufficiently rigorous in the pursuit of its object: the subjective understanding of the unconscious. To do this he outlines four core problems that psychoanalysis has:
It relies on the subjectivity of the analyst leading to the contrasting positions that either psychoanalytic claims are valid but can only be understood and tested by other analysts or that such claims are a forlorn attempt to avoid the usual processes of verification that exist in other areas of inquiry.
It relies on the authority of single-case studies to demonstrate the tru