You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A century since the beginnings of psychoanalysis we still do not know whether Freud's conjectures are correct. The difficulty is not one of fuzzy meanings or substantive implausibility, but of proof. Inferences one makes in a psychoanalytic session are corroborated by how the material “coheres,” converges upon an inferred psychism underlying the behavior. The problem is evidentiary and specifically statistical, since not everything “fits” (as in Freud's jigsaw puzzle analogy). Accuracy of short-term predictions is a
Dr. Meehl is Regents' Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, and Member Emeritus in the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota.
Expansion of a paper read at the Confirmation Conference; an earlier version was prepared for and presented in the Lindemann Lecture Series celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University (March 11, 1977).
This paper was first published in Testing Scientific Theories, ed. J. Earman, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, and reprinted in Selected Philosophical and Methodological Papers, ed. C. A. Anderson and K. Gunderson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 284-337. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota.
semi-objective test of validity, and some other checks on themetracing are suggested.