The Scientific Monthly. LXXIX, 1954: On the Scientific Status of Psychoanalysis. Jerome Richfield.

Richfield suggests that 'the questions and statements ordinarily involved in discussions of the relationship between psychoanalysis and science are arbitrary,

confused, and inadequate. I hope to show that the problem of the scientific status needs restatement.' The author's hope is fulfilled and the restatement is admirable. The 'eulogistic function or emotive significance of the term science' must be recognized. 'It seems to be assumed that to question the scientific status of an activity is equivalent to asking whether that activity is desirable, reliable, and valid.' The scientific opponents of psychoanalysis have differed so fundamentally in their critiques that their particular objections seem to cancel out one another. Thus psychoanalysis has been attacked because it is deterministic and because it does not restrict itself to the orthodox determinism of neurophysiology and biochemistry. One writer accepts only two accounts of psychosomatic sequences because these alone reveal the attention to mechanism he requires in any scientific theory. Another holds that mechanistic explanations 'are a Victorian remnant which recent events in physics have shown to be impossible or undesirable'. The author believes that this bewildering array of diverse criteria results from questions about 'the scientific status' of any study because science, quite as much as psychoanalysis, is a term of varying applicability. 'Questions about the nature of science are not scientific questions.' They 'involve a technical philosophic analysis in terms of some combination of sociological, semantic, ethical, logical, epistemological, and historical facts and values'. With regard to the charge that psychoanalysis is mystical, the author shows that the argument depends on the preconception that knowledge is either perceptual or inferential, with mysticism relegated to some emotional type of experience outside the realm of 'genuine science'. After refuting this argument on logical