The Cultural and Institutional Context of Habermas's View of Psychoanalysis

For more than a decade, the centerpiece of almost any article on the knowledge claims of psychoanalysis has been the debate between those who stress affinities between psychoanalysis and science (e.g., Holzman, 1985) and a group dubbed the “loyal opposition” by Spence (1992). Commonly described as a hermeneutic approach, this latter movement often identifies with work in the humanities, emphasizing particularly the role of narrative in psychoanalysis (Eagle & Wolitzky, 1989; Wallerstein, 1987). Examples include the well-known work of Roy Schafer (1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1983) and Donald Spence (1981, 1982, 1983, 1986).1 Less frequent but by no means uncommon are discussions of quasi-literary topics such as the joint authorship of the analytic work by patient and analyst and the hodgepodge of theories sometimes labeled “constructivist” and “postmodernist” (Elliott, & Spezanno, 1988).2

With few exceptions, arguments for or against a hermeneutic approach to psychoanalysis refer at some point to the discussion of psychoanalysis by Jurgen Habermas3 in his book Knowledge and Human Interest (1971b), and elsewhere (Eagle, 1997, p. 24; Eagle & Wolitzky, 1989, p. 50); Grünbaum, 1984, p. 1; Schafer, 1980, pp. 44-45; Wallerstein, 1987, p. 13).4 Yet despite this routine citation, his work is little understood in the United States. One example may illustrate what I mean. Among “loyal opposition” psychoanalysts, the point is commonly made that each participant in an analytic interaction inevitably approaches