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Psychoanalysts ask two questions: how can we know our own minds, and how can we know the minds of others? Beginning with Freud’s efforts to create a “Scientific Psychology,”† analysts have struggled to study subjectivity as an event that can be investigated empirically. By doing so, we could produce valid knowledge about the mind according to scientific dictates, especially conjecture and refutation (as Karl Popper put it).
Some 125 years after Freud’s “Project,” neuropsychoanalysts are mapping psychoanalytic theories onto a neuroanatomical base. Are they successful? Not yet. Might they be? Yes, assuming that they also find ways to explain why an intervention by one therapist produces better outcomes than the same intervention by another therapist. For example, a famous analyst says to a patient, “Of course, everyone wants to be acknowledged.” A young, unknown analyst says to a patient, “Of course, everyone wants to be acknowledged.” Are these interventions equally effective? Nope. The first intervention is persuasive and even transformative because it draws upon the implicit power of idealization. Lacking the leverage of idealization, the second analyst may come across as trite or merely placating.
Freud discovered this discrepancy, and he lamented the irrationality of these different outcomes. If the right words alone are curative, identical interventions should have equally therapeutic effects. Today, we
acknowledge the role of idealizing transferences and the drive-like need to find validation in the reaction of an idealized person.
The ancient struggle between two epistemologies—the affirmation of objective standards, using measurements, calculations, and logic, and the affirmation of hidden, emotional, libidinal forms of knowing—reappears in debates about how to write history. In the first camp are philosophers like Carl Hampel, who eschew empathic claims. In the second are historians who champion an empathic immersion in the minds and feelings of historical a