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Introductory Note - this paper rather puzzles me. I even remember being rather frightened of it in the middle of reading it at the Paris Congress!
I do not know whether some of the notions I tried to introduce in it - and have not developed further - frightened me because no one else had mentioned them before (such as the notion of a ‘necessary adjunct’) or whether I really recognized them as worthless.
According to methodologists,2 a genuine is distinguished from a pseudo-science by the fact that it is possible to say, not only what evidence would prove its theories true, but also what evidence would prove them false.
Our critics argue that, like astrology, psycho-analysis fails to pass this test because we appear to them to have a limitless capacity to defend ourselves against negative evidence by means of additional hypotheses. There can be no disproof, they say, if a patient's denial of an interpretation can be taken only as evidence of a ‘resistance’; if his assertion that the opposite of what is said of him is true can be explained away in terms of ‘ambivalence’ and the co-existence of conscious and unconscious impulses; and if the analyst, when himself convinced that he should have made a different interpretation, fails to withdraw the first one on the ground that, owing to ‘over-determination’, it is still right at a deeper level.3