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Cartesian Dualists stand and be counted! Just what is the relationship between mind and brain? This is certainly not a question which cropped up during my training in psychoanalysis, and I suspect that while psychoanalysts accept that there is indeed a connection, many of us have had rather little curiosity about what that connection might be. We are impressively broad-minded in allowing two schools of psychoanalytic thought to coexist in the Institute of Psycho-Analysis and training, and have no need to expand our horizons further.
Science used to be the domain of the specialist and the academic, and not an area that the person on the Clapham omnibus would know or have an opinion about. But society's relationship with science is changing fast. Popular science is available to all, and many interested people read and derive their views from the national press. It is depressing to read ill-informed attacks on Freud, sometimes from respected scientists; but, on the whole, psychoanalysts have done little to raise the quality of information from stream of criticism to informed discussion. Perhaps an important step in doing this will be to educate ourselves about where we stand in relation to the other sciences which explore the mind, and to learn the language of those sciences which are relevant to, but different from, psychoanalysis.
Our discipline is not the same kind of science as the physical sciences of chemistry and physics. We cannot make a hypothesis which can be empirically tested, and make general laws which will have secure predictability. Yet we know that in the ‘human’ sciences which study social behaviour (Sociology, Anthropology, Law), it is recognised that some knowledge cannot rely on verifiability in the same way as in the physical sciences, and attacks on psychoanalysis for not being ‘scientific’ are unjustified.
There is a curious anomaly in how many analysts think about the mind. We work with the human mind and recognise the central importance of its de