Causality and Psychoanalysis—A Letter to the Editors of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Sirs:

You have requested me to discuss Dr. Radó's Die Wege der Naturforschung im Lichte der Psychoanalyse1 from the standpoint of a representative of the exact sciences, the occasion being its publication in an English translation, in the pages of your QUARTERLY. Of course, I shall have nothing to say on the psychoanalytic content of the article, which in this age of extreme specialization correlates with extraordinary versatility fields as remote from each other as theoretical physics and psychoanalysis. As to the emotional attitude of the defenders of the traditional concept of causality, I may quote the physicist Heisenberg, who states that "the violence of the arguments regarding the law of causality often gave one the impression that the problem under discussion was not a scientific but a religious subject".2 Moreover, even Planck, whose quantum theory has, in fact, undermined the system of classical—that is, strictly causal–physics, supports the a priori causality principle in the Kantian sense, contending that it alone can be regarded as "satisfying".3

Dr. Radó's disclosure of the psychoanalytic root (not the only root, of course) of the concept of causality is probably a lasting contribution, unaffected by the advance which has taken place in the field of physics since 1922, the year in which the article was first published in German. However, this advance, which