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Freud, it is well known, considered psychoanalysis to be a science. In recent years, however, this particular view of the discipline that Freud founded has fallen on hard times, not only outside of psychoanalysis but inside it as well. Increasingly, there are attacks, many of them very crude, on the scientific status of psychoanalytic
psychology. That people like E. Fuller Torrey and Frederick Crews, who consider themselves enemies of psychoanalysis, should argue that psychoanalysis is unscientific comes as little surprise. What is puzzling is that many adherents of psychoanalysis also now believe that the discipline they practice is not a science (e.g., Schafer, 1983; Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987; see also Ricoeur, 1970). This development, to my mind, poses a greater threat to psychoanalysis than the attacks of people who propose a reductionistic account of the human mind. For proponents of psychoanalysis to concede this point is to agree with proponents of reductionism that our minds cannot be understood in a rigorous, scientifically adequate way that preserves the complexities of human functioning. For this reason, Wilma Bucci's Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science comes at a most opportune time. In her book, Bucci presents a compelling case for continuing to regard psychoanalysis as a science and an equally compelling case for how we might revise and reformulate psychoanalytic theory to render it compatible with current developments in cognitive psychology. It is this second aspect of Bucci's argument—the attempt to revise existing theory in the light of empirical evidence—that renders her approach truly scientific, rather than just another attempt to preserve unmodified Freud's hundred-year-old model of the mind. Although I have my disagreements with some of the particulars of Bucci's proposals, I must give my unreserved endorsement to any thinker who is willing to take on the challenge of revising psychoanalytic theory in an empirically adequate way