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A work in the philosophy of science, albeit using Freud to argue the virtues of “eliminative inductivism” over “falsificationism” of Karl Popper, may seem as far from the clinical concerns of psychoanalysis as a book about psychoanalysis could be. And yet, if treatment and research are as interdependent as analysts, following Freud, generally claim, it behooves them to become aware of Adolf Grünbaum's thorough criticism of Freud's claim to have justified his theories by means of evidence obtained from patients in the psychoanalytic dialogue.
In The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Grünbaum takes psychoanalysis at its word in treating it as a natural science whose hypotheses must be empirically confirmed. If one wishes to call it a social or behavioral science that is no matter, unless one means that it is a hermeneutic or humanistic science. Hermeneutic philosophers such as Habermas and Ricoeur have argued that the data of human affairs have a different relation to their subject than do those of other sciences, being related as meanings rather than as causally connected events. These thinkers are unusual in their relation to Freud's work because they regard their criticism as a rehabilitation of it; i.e., they regard what he says as true, so long as it is properly understood and in particular is separated from his mechanistic metapsychology. In their ranks are analysts who explicitly adopt the hermeneutic banner, such as George S. Klein (Psychoanalytic Theory. IUP, ), and all those who distinguish narrative or subjective truth (what makes sense for the analysand) from objective truth (see Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth. ). Grünbaum devotes a ninety-page Introduction to his main argument to show that they have misinterpreted Freud and based their reconstruction of his work on dubious distinctions (e.g., between reasons and causes) and on faulty understanding of the requirements of science and of the methods of testing hypotheses. Grünbaum's strat