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Robert Caper, London/New York: Routledge, 2009, ix +107 pp., £50 (hardback), £18.99 (paperback)
From Freud's time to the present, psychoanalysis has combined a form of therapy with a research methodology and a body of knowledge. The indissoluble link between treatment and knowledge keeps the emphasis of psychoanalytic work on the emotional liveliness of the moment. It marginalizes a separate body of theory or knowledge, treating it as a defence against the immediate emotional contact between the patient and analyst and between the patient's own conscious and unconscious minds. Here is its unique strength and its unique weakness. On the one hand, psychoanalysis aims to restore a psychic harmony sufficient for feeling emotionally alive, based on mental flexibility, judgement and satisfaction in the actual world; on the other hand, it cannot readily call on an agreed body of theory or on public evidence to support it, or on practices that follow from its theories.
This tension between practice and knowledge easily fractures into two views of psychoanalysis (as either art or science) and two corresponding views on how to validate it (either by appeal to an art-like aspect of the process, such as empathy, or by appeal to scientific verification). These dichotomies affect the training, socialization, qualification and collegial recognition of a psychoanalyst. Typically, a good psychoanalyst can demonstrate to colleagues in his or her school an ability to maintain a psychoanalytic process, but not the scientific validity of psychoanalytic theories and practices; indeed, there is typically an indifference to scientific criteria. None the less, an imperative, from inside and outside the field, to demonstrate the place of psychoanalysis among the sciences has been a thorn in its side since Freud.
A typical reply to the scientific challenge is to retreat into claiming that psychoanalysis isn't that sort of beast. It is, for example, not a science, but a hermeneutic process. In t