Hilary Putnam’s “scientific realism” (there are several conceptions of this realism) entailed, among other things and for example, “the affirmation of the theoretical or ‘unobservable’ entities of our successful sciences, especially physics, e.g. the reality of electrons.” I would argue, as have others in philosophy and psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis as a science1 likewise affirms the existence of theoretical or unobservable entities (that make for the ‘reality’ of unconscious and ‘primary process’ mentation which is ‘a-rational and associatively-based,’ this unconscious reality can be both ‘dynamic’ and cognitive or ‘adaptive’) with epistemic and explanatory effects or consequences, for instance, the corresponding mental states are causes of desires, beliefs, and behavior … and psychic disorders of various kinds (contrast ‘secondary process mentation,’ which involves awareness, is largely rational, rule-following, and ‘logical’ in the manner of common sense, allowing us to see psychological events as continuous or determinist, causal, rational, and explainable). This notion of primary process mentation (along with secondary process mentation) is part of the psychoanalytic theory or philosophy of mind which, after Linda A. W. Brakel, I understand to be fundamental or foundational in the sense that it is the “core psychoanalytic theory with the clinical theory (or theories) derivative thereof.”
As philosophers of science can readily attest, “all scientific theories, methods and techniques have a discrete number of basic and underlying and necessary presuppositions.” Brakel proffers “five foundational precepts [or propositions] that comprise the basic presuppositions of psychoanalysis.” She notes that while there is not agreement among psychoanalysts about the precise nature and number of these presuppositions and assumptions, they should be able to agree that these presuppositions and assumptions are “… (i) taken for granted, (ii) used to derive other psychoanalytic concepts and propositions, and when functioning (iii) generate psychoanalytic data … [where] psychoanalytic data most broadly include everything reported and taking place [largely or eventually, by way of ‘free association’] in psychoanalytic sessions—e.g., dream contents; psychological symptoms …; [changes in] … mood; sexual concerns; slips of the tongue and parapraxes …; phantasies and daydreams; and reports of strong feelings about past persons and persons in the present, including the analyst.” The following are the first three assumptions (I, II, and III), followed by “one methodological tool” [or method] (IV), and one corollary (V):
(I and II) — “The first two assumptions, psychic (psychological) continuity and psychic (psychological) determinism are best considered together. They are psychology-specific versions of two general assumptions that are in place given any scientific theory. Continuity presumes some sort of regularity or lawfulness in the phenomena under study,2 and determinism means simply that the operation of cause and effect is presumed. To assume psychic continuity then is to take for granted that all of the agent’s psychological events—including those that look inconsistent or even incoherent such as pathological symptoms (for instance, phobias to water, benign animals or of open places), slips of the tongue, and parapraxes—are regular/lawful in a particular psychological way for that agent; namely that every psychological event can be understood as psychologically meaningful to that individual. Similarly, to assume psychic determinism is to presume that all psychological events –even those that look incoherent—have at least as one of their causes, a psychological cause, and can thereby be explained (at least in part) on a psychological basis. So for example, a dream element, a delusion, a confabulation all can be presumed to be necessarily regular and lawful phenomena with physical and psychological causes such that these phenomena cannot fail to be psychologically meaningful to the dreaming, delusional, or confabulating agent. Put another way, there is no dream element, delusion, or confabulation, in fact no psychological content possible for a particular person that will not have been caused by some aspect of that person’s psychology and that will not thereby be meaningful to that person.”
(III) — “The third assumption of psychoanalysis is that there exists a dynamic (psychologically meaningful) unconscious. It is posited because without such a postulate many psychological events ‘seem’ neither psychically continuous nor determined. [By way of example, Brakel proceeds to narrate a vivid account of a slip of the tongue she experienced.] [….] [T]he assumption of interceding unconscious processes and contents allows psychological determinism and continuity to be evident generally, even in those psychological events (such as neurotic symptoms, dream elements, delusions, and hallucinations) seemingly inconsistent to the point of frank bizarreness.”
(IV) — “The one methodological tool necessary for psychoanalysis is free association. Free association as part of the foundational core of psychoanalytic general theory has an interesting status in that it functions in a dual manner. First, free associations demonstrate apparent violations of psychic continuity and psychic determinism by revealing psychological events like parapraxes and symptoms that seem incoherent, with no meaningful psychological cause. Second, free associations resolve the apparent violations in continuity and determinism by providing the psychological contents, which when taken in conjunction with the assumption of a dynamic unconscious, can render what was seemingly inconsistent as quite continuous, now admitting of transparent psychological causation.” [Brackel then provides a compelling illustration of the dual functioning of frees association from the analysis of one of her patients.]
(V) — “The final element comprising the foundational structure of psychoanalytic general theory—positing primary and secondary processes as two formally different types of mentation—is best described as a corollary to the other fundaments. The corollary status obtains because positing primary and secondary processes follows from and is demonstrated by the application of the three [foregoing] basic assumptions and free association. [….] Secondary process thinking is the largely rational, rule-following, ordinary logic of adults in the alert, waking state. Primary process thinking, in contrast, is a-rational and associatively based. When the secondary processes predominate, psychological events look continuous, caused, explainable, and rational. [….] Primary process thinking, on the other hand, is clearly not rational. Instead, it is a-rational. [….] Its hallmarks, in addition to the absence of ordinary rationality, displacement, and the type of feature-based categorizing by resemblance shown above [i.e., the two personal examples she provided in III and IV above that I’ve left out], include condensations (combining thoughts that by ordinary logic do not belong together), categorizations by contiguity in time and/or space, and substitutions of part for whole. Dream elements perhaps provide the most obvious, plentiful, and accessible examples of primary process contents demonstrating the effects of the operations (in all combinations) of these many a-rational processes.” [Brakel informs us in a note why she chose the term ‘a-rationality’ rather than irrationality: ‘A-rationality’ is much broader in its application than is ‘irrationality,’ the term more typically employed. Whereas irrationality implies rationality that has gone astray, entailing a dispositional capacity for rationality, a-rationality implies no such thing. Thinking, for example, can be a-rational if it is ‘not-yet-rational’ as in very young humans and ‘never-to-be-rational/but good enough for survival’ as in certain birds and mammals.’]
Notes
1. It is a science of subjectivity or the person, one that is in part parasitic on existing natural and social sciences and the humanities, although its philosophy of mind and psychological theory account for both its novelty, including its clinical practices within traditions of care and healing of the psyche generally and mind-body medicine or therapeutics in particular.
2. As Brakel notes, this is not “tightly constrained,” which is one way of saying science deals in generalities, that theories are schematic insofar as they introduce “order” into experience, some sort of taxonomy or classification of the relevant empirical facts; the taxonomy is scientific to the extent it is sufficiently universal so as to be employed consistently by the relevant community of scientists; at bottom it is a matter of “pattern recognition.” Any such classification is a “theory-laden” activity that unavoidably involves some reference to the surrounding intellectual and social environment. Philip Kitcher and other philosophers of science have shown how theory construction strongly resembles a cartographic practice, our theories being very much like maps. In the words of John Ziman:
“Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed ‘reality.’ They are social institutions. They abstract, classify and simplify numerous ‘fact.’ They are functional. They required skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently more than a vivid metaphor. [….]
Thus to state that a certain ‘effect’ has a certain ‘cause’ merely corresponds to pointing to an ‘itinerary’ on a more general theoretical map. Such a statement is meaningless unless combined with other information about the scientific context in which it is to be interpreted—that is to say, how it is connected with other statements of cat or theory about the entities involved. Indeed, scientific theories can often be mapped as abstract networks, where nodes of fact and/or concept are cross-linked in many dimensions by laws, formulae, family resemblances or other functional relationships. [….]
… [S]cientific theories have to be understood as purposeful generalizations. Indeed, one of the achievements of the social sciences is to provide people with unsuspected ‘meanings’ for many cultural features of their lives. The entities that figure in a scientific theory are selected and simplified to suits its scope and function. Scientific theories, like maps, are under-determined. They are products of their time and place. They emerge out of the exercise of originality and scepticism in a disputatious community. Of course there are moments when a novel scientific theory seems precisely right. But its form and substance are neither pre-ordained or permanent. Even the most compelling theory is usually shaped by unconscious aesthetic and utilitarian criteria. [….] Even good scientific theories, like good maps, can present the same ‘domain’ in a great variety of very different forms. [….] [It is of course important to keep in mind that] a map is not the same as the geography it represents.”
Ziman makes several more points about scientific theorizing applicable to psychoanalysis. First, scientific knowledge and reasoning are not “ruled by formal logic.” In other words, algorithmic compression and mathematical formalism are not absolutely necessary for scientific theories if only because “not all the scientifically observable features of the world can be measured, and not all the results of scientific measurement can properly be treated as variables in mathematical formulae.” We must be alert to the “well-known danger of making unrealistic or over-simplified assumptions about real-world entities in order to set up a tractable mathematical model of their behaviour. As Hilary Putnam reminded us and Ziman reiterates, “the domain of science [and rationality itself] extends far outside the scope of formal reasoning,” and “scientific reasoning varies from discipline to discipline. [….] According to the circumstances, valid scientific reasoning may involve the evaluation of testimony, empathic understanding of human behaviour, pattern recognition, category formation, classification, generalization, analogy, unification and, above all, the grammar of a natural language. [….] In effect, scientific rationality is no more than practical reasoning carried out as well as possible in the context of research.”
Coda
As Agnes Petocz writes in her persuasive contribution to the edited volume by Boag, Brakel and Talvite, “Almost everyone agrees that the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis has been ‘done to death.’” But neither side has budged in this often passionate and sometimes acrimonious debate. I think Ziman’s book (cited in the references below) helps us clarify how it is not at all difficult to explain the several ways in which psychoanalysis can amply qualify as a science. On the other hand, and ironically, mainstream academic psychology, which fancies itself as a “real” (if not ‘hard’) science in contrast to the fraudulent credentials of psychoanalysis, is actually on quite brittle grounds and fragile footing insofar as it is “shot through with misconceptions of science and is thus scientistic rather than genuinely scientific.”
References: Most of the material for this post was taken from Linda A.W. Brakel, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009). She expands a bit on this argument in chapter six of the volume she edited with Simon Boag and Vesa Talvite: Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting (Routledge, 2018 [Karnac Books, 2015]). The extensive material from John Ziman in the second note is from his book, Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Relevant Bibliographies
- Addiction: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
- Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
- Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
- Dreams and Dreaming
- The Emotions
- Health: Law, Ethics, and Social Justice
- Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
- Marxism and Freudian Psychology
- Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences
- Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line
- Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
- Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
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