T. Mehr:
Well, perhaps not. But that is nevertheless the issue that Unka addresses in his column. And apparently, in the Cecil Adams universe, “unfalsifiable” = “unscientific” = “quackery.” Surprisingly primitive, really, coming from someone who claims to be the world’s smartest human being – Popper would no doubt be rolling over in his grave. Even I know better, and I’m just a lowly member of the teeming millions.
However, let’s be careful not to move the goal posts here. It would be a mistake on your part to imply that the “psychoanalytic project,” as envisioned by its founder, was anything other than an attempt to create a “natural science” of the mind. In other words, even if none of Freud’s defenders in this discussion have claimed that psychoanalysis is a “science,” Freud nevertheless did so on numerous occasions in his own writings. For example, consider this passage taken from his last published worked, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, finished only days before he committed suicide:
Although Freud seldom wasted much time writing about this issue, when he did mention it he almost invariably argued that psychoanalysis should be considered a valid branch of the natural sciences, one that dealt with the “objective” investigation of the human mind. And he apparently felt that the clinic, along with the Basic Rule of psychoanalysis (free association), provided a kind of experimental laboratory in which his theories could be tested.
After Freud’s death his followers tended in general to argue even more stringently (if unsuccessfully) for the inclusion of psychoanalysis under the umbrella of the natural sciences. The primary stumbling block was the issue of methodology, really. Proponents of psychoanalysis tried to argue that the therapeutic meeting was also a kind of “laboratory” that produced results which could reasonably be understood as “scientific.” Opponents argued that the individuality, variability, and subjectivity of those meetings mitigated against the possibility that they could produce anything even remotely resembling “scientific” knowledge. I would argue that by the late 50s or early 60s, the opponents of psychoanalysis had won the field, and that (due to a number of social and institutional factors), psychoanalysis seemed destined for the dustbin.
But at that point a new group of scholars, along with a few psychoanalysts, attempted to rescue the discipline by reorienting its knowledge content. Jurgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur, as well as the influential analysts Morton Gill and George S. Klein, attempted to reposition psychoanalysis, not as a natural science, but as a “hermeneutic” (i.e., “interpretive”) discipline. They claimed that Freud labored under a “scientistic self-misunderstanding,” and that the “language” of the psychoanalytic theory – formulated in the idiom of the natural sciences – corresponded poorly the phenomena it attempted to address: such as the meaning of the patient’s suffering, for instance, or the interpretation of unconscious fantasies, and so forth. They argued that psychoanalysis could be better understood as a hermeneutic discipline – that it rested on an epistemological basis no better, no worse, merely different, from a “postivistic” natural science. Psychoanalysts flocked to this view, and these days, very few would attempt to defend the field as a natural science (as you rightly note).
As for Cecil’s column, I think it can be divided into two interesting, not necessarily related, questions: 1) was Freud a duck – uh, I mean, a quack; and 2) is psychoanalysis a science?
The answer to the first question, IMHO, is both yes and no. To take the no side first, Freud was without doubt one of Europe’s most respected neurologists, and certainly a respected scientist, prior to his development of psychoanalytic techniques in the last decade of the 19th century. This period of Freud’s life, his first 40 years, are all but forgotten in most biographies, although some work has been done on it during the last decade. (I can recommend Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind to anyone who might be interested in history of Freud’s ideas, and in his scientific production prior to psychoanalysis). In particular, as a neurologist, Freud was an internationally-recognized specialist on aphasia, and published a large monograph on childhood aphasia that was still being used as a textbook on the subject 30 years later.
However, even this period isn’t without its dark spots. In particular, Freud discovered cocaine and for some reason became convinced that it was a new wonder drug. He participated in the experiments for its use as a anesthetic (for eye operations), although another physician (Carl Koller) “stole” the credit for the discovery. Anyway, the addictive, negative side effects of cocaine were gradually discovered, and Freud’s earlier work proved scandalous. He was partially responsible for at least one man’s death: he attempted to help him overcome a morphine addiction with a prescription of nose-candy!
Moving on to the “yes” side of the equation, Freud’s apparently false claims of therapeutic success via psychoanalysis are, to my mind, much more worrisome, and place him dangerously close to the “quack” category. In some cases, he simply “exaggerated”: for example, he claimed to have cured “Elisabeth von R,” who suffered from numerous hysterical symptoms, including an inability to walk. Years afterwards, Ms. Von R confided to her daughter that Freud was “just a young, bearded nerve-specialist they sent me to…He tried to persuade me that I was in love with my brother-in-law, but that really wasn’t so.” Although we can’t know for certain if Freud’s treatment had any effect on the woman, it is nevertheless the case that, according to his later theories, it shouldn’t have; he had not yet discovered resistance, transference, or the Oedipal complex when he treated Ms. von R, all of which he later would claim were necessary elements for a psychoanalytic cure (i.e, interpretation of the transference, removal of the resistance, and working through of infantile sexual fantasies).
In some cases it appeared that Freud lied outright: he claims in Analysis Terminable and Interminable that he had successfully cured the Wolf Man, which is simply false, and should have been know as false by him. The Wolf Man (Serje Pankejeff) was something of well-kept secret among psychoanalysts, continuing to live on their kindness and even undergoing an occasional re-analysis. Despite Freud’s statement to the contrary, he was never “cured.”
It’s a shame that Cecil has chosen to employ such a categorical and negatively-charged label as “quack” in reference to Freud. I don’t think one can say outright, with no reservations, that Freud was a “quack.” But, as I noted in the debate thread earlier, he certainly was a little “quacky” at times.
As far as the second question goes, well, I could write a bit. Suffice to say that I find it surprising that someone who claims to be the world’s smartest human being would employ the falsification criterion as demarcation between science and non-science, or use it to try to rule out psychoanalysis as non-scientific. Has Cecil never heard of Pierre Duhem, W.V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerbend, Imre Lakatos, or even Adolf Grunbaum? Underdetermination, anyone? Duhem-Quine thesis? The “tally argument”? No?
) was that early work was not producing testable predictions. But that was a matter of development. The goal of the various string theories was always to produce verifiable predictions. The same is true of D-brane theories. For example, there is no reason why such theories could not modify Hawking radiation calculations. It has been a long time since anyone considered string theorists to be crackpots.