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In these days, when the scientific bona fides of psychoanalysis are under assault from so many quarters, a serious scientific reappraisal of Freud based on research is bound to be important as well as timely. The present work is such an undertaking, updating the authors' 1977 project, The Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy.
The first few pages, including the brief preface, foreshadow the strengths and weaknesses of the whole project, much as the first session or first dream may prefigure the course of an analysis. The authors, both clinical psychologists engaged in research, adopt the common-sense premise (perhaps not so common these days) that Freud's theories “do not represent a unitary monolithic structure [but] consist of a network of quasi-independent minitheories” (p. vii) that are bound to vary in their scientific fortunes. This, clearly, is a researcher's stance, not that of an armchair philosopher of science who sweepingly pontificates on the entire psychoanalytic enterprise. One encounters in these pages the nuanced problems and puzzles that real scientific work turns up: findings may not be replicable; or they may be reliable but make no sense; or there may be unexpected interactions; or, too typically, the theory is neither clearly refuted nor supported, or what is supported is not what was anticipated; and, in any case, the instruments may or may not have been measuring what was intended; or, given even clear findings, the permissible interpretations are subject to dispute.
The authors also adopt the necessary position, in my view, that “psychoanalysis should be bound by the same standards as all other disciplines aspiring to respectable empirical status” (p. 1). Thus, there is no special kind of science possessed of privileged dispensations or predefined perimeters. A good story (theory, model)