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Whenever I pick up a book on the epistemology or scientific status of psychoanalysis, I start by looking at the index and list of references. If the name of Robert Waelder does not appear there, or if there are but one or two cursory citations, I know the author has not done his homework. Unfortunately this is usually the case even among psychoanalytic authors. Edelson (1984), for example, in his well-known book on the scientific status of psychoanalysis, refers to Waelder only once, in passing:
one may find it useful to refer to metapsychological writings in an attempt to identify a core set of theoretical ideas in psychoanalysis. Anyone who makes this attempt…should be familiar at least not only with the works of Freud but as well with the notable efforts to systematize psychoanalytic theory of Arlow and Brenner; , Fenichel , Gill , Klein , Rapaport (, , , , , ), Rubinstein (, , , ), Schur , and Waelder (1960). Waelder's book, the work of someone who knew science, is unjusdy neglected. (p. 79)
Ironically, Edelson himself exemplifies this unjust neglect by not only neglecting the book, Basic Theory of Psychoanalysis (Waelder, 1960) but also by ignoring Waelder's other major contributions to psychoanalytic epistemology and philosophy of science (1936, 1956, 1962, 1963, , 1970). Modell (1984) refers only to Waelder's well-known 1962 paper, “Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy,” and, in my estimation, misses Waelder's main point, that what is most basic to the science of psychoanalysis is the data of lived subjective experience, both the patient's and the analyst's, and that the scientific method of psychoanalysis is “largely, though by no means entirely, a matter of introspection and empathy” (p. 263). Modell does