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another challenge to the Gri.inbaum/Crews position is that what is scien–
tific about psychoanalysis isn't the interpretation made by an analyst during
a session about something that was said by the patient. What is scientific
about psychoanalysis is whether a therapeutic process guided by the theo–
ry that generates those interpretations makes a difference to patients' lives,
whether it works, whether it works better than a therapy guided by some
other set of ideas or hypotheses. I would say that if a psychoanalytic set of
theories guided psychoanalysts allover the world in treating patients who
got better more consistently when treated by that model than when treat–
ed by other therapies, then I would be untroubled by the fact that no single
interpretation could be validated in a way that makes Gri.inbaum happy.
Going back to Crews: we've talked about his recovered memory argu–
ment, we've talked about the Freud as a person argument, we've talked
about Freud's scientific methodology argument, and we've talked about the
scientific status of contemporary psychoanalysis. I think those are probably
the major issues he raises in his papers. To me the central problem I can't
understand goes beyond Crews: it is the venom as opposed to the intel–
lectual critique that's embedded in his arguments. I can easily imagine
people sitting in a room discussing whether or not psychoanalytic clinical
methodology is consistent with Popper's notion of the nature of science,
but I have trouble understanding people doing this with rage, passion and
hatred, that is with the affect that is apparent in his book. I can't explain
where it comes from. I suspect that this actually may be a psychoanalytic
question, perhaps the only one the book really raises, but I don't have the
relevant data to address it. I do have one fragment of data: decades earlier
Crews was on the other side of the debate, rather naively defending psy–
choanalysis as a scientific psychology, claiming that its scientific status was
equivalent to behavioral psychology and arguing passionately on its behalf.
I would speculate that the characteristics that lead one to passionate over–
idealization also lead one to passionate de-idealization, but that's only an
ad
hominem
argument.
Why has psychoanalysis been the target of so much other cultural crit–
icism, attack, and interest? My impression is that very little of it has to do
with what psychoanalysts think psychoanalysis is. For example, many peo–
ple who feel that our society is too "permissive," or that there is an
unfortunate tendency to exculpate people from personal responsibility for
various kinds of actions, or to explain away evil behavior through devel–
opmental or psychodynamic formulations, or to dilute our concept of
personal morality link all of those trends to psychoanalysis. I think they
mean that something has happened in the last one hundred years that
allows us to think of people in ways that seem to diminish the importance
of the moral perspective in viewing their behavior and think of their
