The Confusion over Personification and Reification

Some frequently encountered statements in the psychoanalytic literature suggest a commitment to philosophical ideas that were once quite fashionable but are now obsolete. Such thinking has posed a significant obstacle to the fruitful integration of psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology. Although there is a heated debate between the proponents of classical cognitivism versus connectionist ideas of parallel, distributed, processing, the importance of the distinction between mechanism versus content is undisputed in cognitive science. One reason for the failure of this basic distinction to influence the thinking of psychoanalysts is a common view that it is an error of “reification” to speak of unobservable (i.e., “theoretical”) entities as though they exist. This notion fails to take account of an important shift in the ongoing philosophical debate between Instrumentalists versus Realists over the status of theoretical entities. Whereas early in this century an atheistic form of Instrumentalism that denies the existence of theoretical entities was dominant, contemporary versions of Instrumentalism take an agnostic stance claiming merely that it is reasonable to doubt the existence of such entities. Similarly, it was once believed that the use of “homunculi” in psychological theories leads inescapably to an infinite regress.

Today it is widely believed that the provisional use of homunculi in psychological theories can make an important contribution to scientific progress even if such homunculi will be progressively eliminated in favor of purely mechanistic explanations.