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IS THERE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE THAT PROVIDES SUPPORT FOR the claim that psychoanalysis as treatment is efficacious? Is there empirical evidence that justifies provisional acceptance of psychoanalytic hypotheses about neurotic symptoms, dreams, and parapraxes as true over rival hypotheses? In our society (a society threatened by endemic irrationality and swept by antiintellectual currents), those who are especially concerned to preserve, to put forward, and indeed to insist upon adherence to cognitive scientific canons increasingly and ever more emphatically tend to answer these two questions "No." More seriously, that negative answer has come to include the assertion "and it is in principle impossible to obtain such evidence by psychoanalytic methods of investigation."
Psychoanalysts should not remain mute before such an answer to these questions; dismissively belittle those who make it; or evade it by redefining psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline—a branch of the humanities rather than a science.
Psychoanalysis as a science, like any other science, must conform in its reasoning and methods to scientific canons. These