The Prospects for Psychoanalysis: A Discussion Review of Eagle, M. (1984), Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation. New York:  McGraw-Hill. Edelson, M. (1984), Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis. Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press. Grünbaum, A. (1984), The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:  University of California Press. Moore, M. S. (1984), Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Adolf Grünbaum's sharp critique of orthodox psychoanalytic thought and of some of its philosophical defenders is especially important because of the novel way in which he formulates

the charge that clinical data may be produced by suggestion. Grünbaum argues that the combination of this possibility with the great opportunity for a therapist to direct, albeit un wittingly, the free associations and behavioral changes of the patient renders clinical data too irremediably contaminated to provide scientifically cogent evidence for Freud's etiological hypotheses.

Marshall Edelson reacts to various aspects of this objection that had appeared in Grünbaum's earlier publications, and, while granting that the psychoanalytic literature has not yet provided materials that adequately meet such concerns about testing psychoanalytic theory on the couch, Edelson attempts to sketch how this might be accomplished in the future.

Edelson also grants that Freud did claim to have rested his theories on scientific evidence meeting the standards of scientific credibility specified by what Grünbaum calls eliminative inductivism, illustrated in part by John Stuart Mill's methods of agreement and difference. Such standards require grounds for provisionally accepting a hypothesis as true over plausible competing hypotheses. Grünbaum maintains that Freud initially attempted to meet these standards by employing what Grünbaum calls the tally argument, which I shall discuss later, and that although Freud himself eventually acknowledged that this argument is faulty, he never provided a suitable substitute for it.

Some of the newer contents of Grünbaum's book lie in a sustained attempt, of which I shall be rather critical, to undercut Freud's defense of the portion of the theory of repression that Grünbaum sometimes calls the repression “etiology”, that is, the hypothesis that at least sometimes repressed mental contents c