Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

February 11, 1969. PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION. Emanuel Peterfreund, M.D.

This paper is an excerpt from Dr. Peterfreund's forthcoming book, Information, Systems, and Psychoanalysis, and supplements an earlier paper (1965) in

which the author delineated what he feels to be some of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic theory. He extends his earlier objections to basic psychoanalytic theory, noting (a) the serious confusion of languages and the limited explanatory power of current psychoanalytic theory; (b) the primitive and confused nature of the concept of the ego and the tautological nature of explanatory statements which primarily depend on the concept of the ego; and (c) that the concept of the ego is based on a 'pre-Freudian view of man'. He objects to high level theoretical generalizations concerning the psychic apparatus subsumed under the concepts of the ego and sexual psychic energy. He presented a brief clarification of how scientific explanations operate; in general, scientific statements move increasingly toward universal statements which unite disparate phenomena in a simple parsimonious manner; by contrast, primitive scientific thought is distinctly anthropomorphic and tends to focus on subjective, qualitative human experiences. Modern science is rooted in empiric observations from which man abstracts theories. Clinical language is not an infallible guide to good theoretical thinking and it commonly employs anthropomorphisms for purposes of communication. Much of current psychoanalytic theory has low explanatory power and does not satisfactorily account for the phenomena it attempts to explain.

Freud attempted to free himself from the neurology and biology of his time by basing psychoanalytic theory on psychological grounds with a psychic apparatus as its basic theoretical model. Such concepts as the ego, psychic energy, neutralization, and fusion are characteristic concepts within this frame of reference.