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Using “place” and “palace” as metaphors for location and via explication of the etymology of these words (i.e., from Latin for road and house of the Royal), the author explores some implications in considering psychoanalysis (the discipline of the royal road) as a science or a humanity. Various underpinnings of science are explored as they presumably pertain to psychoanalysis. To think of psychoanalysis as a science invariably means understanding it as a medical science that involves the search for causes (etiology) for understanding and treatment. As such, reductionism and materialism necessarily assert themselves. Are these doctrines consistent with psychoanalysis? What is gained and what is lost? What does it mean to make a subject the object of investigation via objective methods? Are there deep contradictions for a logical positivist science of mind? What might the humanities offer as ways of thinking about subjects?
In order to more fully understand the position of psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry that offers what Marv Hyman (1994) refers to as a “means of access to important information about the emotional lives of individuals” (p. 6), we must attempt to locate psychoanalysis within the context of other fields. We invariably ask ourselves, implicitly or explicitly, something like: Is our discipline more like poetry/history/philosophy, i.e., situating psychoanalysis in what Kavanaugh (1998) refers to as the Arts of Communication, the Arts of Continuity, and the Arts of Critical Thinking, or more like medicine and physiology, i.e., the natural sciences? The observation that we have to ask this question at all (or one like it) is itself intriguing.
The question has long been with psychoanalysis despite