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This collection of papers on contemporary psychoanalytic research represents a sample of current explorations in and around the field. Published in English, the book developed out of international symposia on this topic, conducted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 2001 to 2003. In her introduction, in discussing the historical and philosophical conflicts about whether
psychoanalysis is a science, editor Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch notes that the field has survived both its dismissive detractors and proponents who proffered a special status different from the natural sciences.
This book's emphasis is on documenting Freud's epistemolog-ical approach as a monist. Mind is physically embodied; the physical and the mental exist along a continuum. When Freud set aside his scientific project because he had gone as far as possible according to the state of knowledge about brain function at that time, and when he found that studying the psychological was an open avenue, he pursued the scientific method in a nonreductive, methodological physicalism, discovering regularities, generalizations, and explanations, subject to modification and correction with accumulating experience. His metapsychology was a superstructure, offering a provisional grasp, subject to testing and control.
In Freud's view, the psychological was a dependent concomitant of physical processes. He made clear his hope and expectation that the psychoanalytic superstructure would one day be supported by a physical foundation. Psychoanalysis as an Empirical Interdisciplinary Science is presented in that spirit. It is organized in three sections, described below.
“Psychoanalysis, Philosophy of Mind, and Experimental Sciences: Research on Conscious and Unconscious Processes”
Howard Shevrin contributes an elegant chapter on developments in subliminal research, in which he emphasizes that, while psychoanalysis offers the only comprehensive theory of mind that we have, empirical and experimental methods of study a