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This is a work of importance in the current, apparently ever-widening, debates about the “scienticity” of psychoanalysis. Professor Grunbaum is an eminent philosopher of science, particularly of physics. He is thoroughly steeped in the literature of psychoanalysis, new as well as old, and does not rest his account merely on the Freudian corpus. Moreover, he is strictly judicial in his critique; if occasionally he allows himself a barbed comment on an interpreter, it is more in the tone of a judge rebuking a witness to underscore the standards from which the latter has departed.
These qualities are evident in the strategy of the book. Grünbaum makes it clear that the inquiry moves toward a verdict of unproven with respect to the scientific claims of psychoanalytic clinical theory, perhaps even the stronger verdict of unprovable in the terms in which it is traditionally cast. Yet he is not hospitable to the promiscuous reconstructions that set psychoanalysis apart from the mainstream of scientific endeavor, whether on subjectivist or phenomenological or hermeneutical grounds. As he sees it, Freud rightly claimed that psychoanalysis was to be judged as a science in its study of human processes. Grünbaum has the highest respect for Freud's stature as a scientific methodologist. This is not merely asserted repeatedly, but given body by examining how Freud at various stages of his development formulated the