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I am pleased to respond to the comments of Druck (2014) and Reis (2014) on my paper, “The Interplay of Deductive and Inductive Reasoning in Psychoanalytic Theorizing,” of which the primary focus is an exploration of deductive reasoning in psychoanalytic theory. It is a companion piece to an earlier paper (C. Hanly 1992). It is an affirmation of the fundamental place of observation and inductive reasoning—facts of observation and inferences from them—in psychoanalytic knowledge, without which theory remains too conjectural and speculative.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It includes questions of the reliability and generalizability of clinical observations in psychoanalysis, such as the question at the extreme end of the spectrum of whether or not there is such a thing as a clinical fact to observe. However, the importance of epistemology as a philosophical discipline can be exaggerated, insofar as clinicians may work as critical realists while espousing some form of subjectivist epistemology.
I shall argue in what follows that at least some psychoanalytic epistemologists are inconsistent subjectivists or inconsistent objectivists. An analyst who is working for the most part by relying rigidly on received, preferred ideas—rather than being receptive enough to the patient to test his preferred ideas against the actual experience, memories, fantasies,