Letters

To the Editor:

The contemptuous tone of Robert Holt's (Psychoanalytic Books, 7, 295-301) criticisms of the methodology I use in my book, Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis (1995a) makes it difficult to engage in sensible scholarly debate. The psychoanalytic reader needs no help in judging such remarks by their tenor. And I will not use journal space to take up the smaller matters with which he concerns himself. In addition to the incivility and the tangents, however, Holt raises one issue of real importance. It concerns what constitutes proper scientific research. While Holt no longer insists that I offer interpretations without evidence, he now claims that what I do with it is not scientific.

A good place to start is with the meaning of the word empirical. In psychology, it is often used to mean quantitative or experimental: Empirical evidence is quantitative evidence. In clinical psychology, it is properly obtained by paper and pencil tests, behavioral ratings, objectively scored projective tests, and similar observations made in order to test a hypothesis. Yet if we consult our Oxford English Dictionaries, where words are defined etymologically, we are surprised to find that in our use of the word empirical we have uprooted its meaning. There we see that the word has nothing to do with measurement or quantification. Empirical means by experience or experiment. It is derived from the Greek word for experience. Its antonym is theoretical, not qualitative.

The formal experiment is one way to make observations and gather experience, but it is not the only way. There are also naturalistic forms of empiricism, such as studying what people actually say about themselves, their work, and their lives in intimate and private correspondence with their closest friends (see Newton, 1995b). One can study such letters to find empirical sequences and other patterns, as I did in my biography of Freud. Similarly, in our new book, Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch (1