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The lack of quantitative data supporting psychoanalytic theory derived from controlled and replicable designs makes psychoanalysis vulnerable to intense criticism. This criticism comes from both inside and outside the psychoanalytic community.
From within psychoanalysis, Glover concluded in 1952 that “A large proportion of current theorizing and clinical findings is little more than unchecked speculation” (p. 404). More than three decades later, Eagle and Wolitzky (1985), in their review of the scientific status of psychoanalysis, come to a similar conclusion.
Freud and others strongly assert that psychoanalysis is a natural science equivalent in credibility to the other natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry. For example, Freud (1925) in his autobiography wrote, “I have always felt it a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psychoanalysis like any other natural science” (p. 58; see also Brenner, 1968). Yet, some psychoanalysts (Engel, 1968; Mendelsohn and Silverman, 1987) point out that a crucial distinction exists between psychoanalysis and the other natural sciences. In the other sciences, research methods have been developed and widely accepted for verifying hypotheses. The science of psychoanalysis has not developed such a methodological tradition.
Jacob Arlow (1982) describes the urgent nature of the need for quantitative data supporting psychoanalytic principles. He writes:
We are approaching a postapostolic era in psychoanalytic history. In a few years, we will no longer have with us colleagues who had direct or indirect contact with the founding fathers. Our confidence in our
* I am grateful to Lena Belfrage-Blau and Marsha K. Wolfman for their assistance in completing this article.
Page 245work will have to rely not on the memories of bygone heroes, but on the solid observational data, meticulously garnered in the analytic situation and objectively evaluated. For it is upon this set of procedures that the claim of psychoanalysis to a place among th