Letters

To the Editor:

On the opening page of the Preface of my Validation book, I quoted the following passage from Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis by Marshall Edelson (1988), a well-known analyst, who is also noted for his literacy in the philosophy of science:

The most telling outside challenge to psychoanalysis has been the questions raised by Adolf Grünbaum about its empirical foundations and mode of inquiry. The most telling manifestations of the difficulties in which psychoanalysis now finds itself are both the lack, for the most part, of a cogent response to these questions (I except my own work, of course), and the various kinds of responses these questions have received instead. (p. ix)

Louis Berger's uniformly evasive, hand-waving, and petulantly grudging review of my book (Psychoanalytic Books, 4, 462—470) illustrates, with a vengeance, the sorry state of affairs deplored by Edelson in his second sentence. Thus, Berger's mode of disputation can be understood from his own remark that “Grünbaum's criticisms touch a raw nerve among psychoanalysts” (p. 467).

Indeed, his review is a clumsy, failed attempt to suppress my book: He tells us that, from the point of view of my “strong critics” like himself, Validation “would not merit reading,” since my work continues to be “uninteresting and psychoanalytically uninformed.” But even for my “admirers” or “fans,” he opines maliciously, “it might not be necessary to go to the monograph,” inasmuch as the earlier, unrevised versions of most of its chapters are available in the literature, though only in widely scattered places of which psychoanalysts are typically unaware, let alone would ferret out to read. How galling it must therefore be for Berger that the London Times Literary Supplement devoted a lengthy lead-review (Flanagan, 1993) to my Validation, and that the TIME magazine article “The Assault on Freud” (Gray, 1993, pp. 49 and 51) gave it major play by stating that “defenders [of psychoanalysis] must now confront” thi