The Debate Over Freud's Self-Understanding

Freud described psychoanalysis as belonging to the realm of natural science. What did he mean by “natural science,” and what bearing ought Freud's assertions about the status of psychoanalysis have on how we evaluate it? This issue is at the forefront of the debate between Adolf Grünbaum and the hermeneuticists, Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas, over the sorts of standards against which psychoanalysis ought to be assessed. The hermeneuticists (Habermas 1971; Ricoeur, 1981) work within a natural/human science dichotomy and place psychoanalysis within the latter category, whereas Grunbaum (1984) argues that psychoanalysis ought to be evaluated as a natural science. Both Grunbaum and the hermeneuticists appeal to claims about Freud's self-understanding or self-misunderstanding in order to establish their positions. In this paper I will argue that these claims are inadequate and problematic as a basis on which to ground how we ought to evaluate psychoanalysis.

Habermas and Ricoeur repudiate Freud's claim that psychoanalysis is a natural science. They hold that, unlike a positivistic science methodology, psychoanalytic theory, which developed from the clinical encounter, was based on a special form of interpretation. Freud's postulation of unconscious thought processes arose out of a logic of inquiry that focused on the seemingly meaningless and inexplicable communications of the patient. In an attempt to explain the existence and significance of various inexplicable communications (e.g., slips, neurotic symptoms, etc.), psychoanalysis parted company with physiological medicine. Symptoms are signs full of meaning; they have a sense of their own. The hermeneuticists view symptoms as intentional communications and not simply as signs from which we can infer physical correlates. As intentional communications that are unconscious, the verbalizations and symptomology of the patient