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tion of meanings by imaginatively rewording the dialogue that went on
between himself and his patient, he would probably reject that description
of what he was doing. He thought he was discovering preexisting mean–
ings in the patient's mind, meanings that were the derivatives of underlying
biological processes in the patient's nervous system. By manipulating those
meanings he could affect the underlying biological processes and therefore
affect his patient. As psychoanalysis matured the biological hypotheses
failed to be very generative; they didn't lead to valuable ideas, new treat–
ments, or i:?iological discoveries. They did provide an immensely rich
metaphoric source for clinical thinking, but not a set of ideas that bridged
biology and psychology.
Psychoanalysts began to "de-biologize" psychoanalysis and to employ
it more and more as a purely psychological method of inquiry, discovery
and treatment. In contemporary psychoanalysis there is very little mean–
ingful biology, only the historic origins of the metaphors that dominate it.
In fact, if you want to understand psychoanalysis in 1997, the biology of
1897 is more important than the biology of 1997. Every once in a while
somebody attempts a translation of contemporary psychoanalytic concepts
to contemporary cognitive science or contemporary neurobiology. This is
possible, but it doesn't lead to progress, only a demonstration that the
translation can be made. Psychoanalytic ideas stem from an earlier biology,
but they are not biological.
If this is so, how do we understand the process in which analysts are
involved? One way of thinking about it is to say that Freud had it wrong
and the psychoanalysts were naIve enough to accept his view.
Psychoanalysis is neither biology nor science, it is a different kind of enter–
prise altogether.
It
is legitimate, it is scholarly, it is fascinating, but it is an
enterprise involved in searching for, perhaps constructing, and translating
meanings. It is a hermeneutic rather than a natural scientific activity. This
is immensely appealing, especially to those analys ts who for generations
have felt guilty about not being good scientists and who had suddenly
learned they were wrong: they were not bad scientists, but rather gifted
hermeneuticists-skilled in the interpretation of symbolic language. This
is reassuring and leads to much more pleasant gatherings, and all kinds of
secondary advantages.
It
also leads to some discomfort. It is less comfort–
able to suggest that you have a treatment for a disease, when you think of
yourself as co-constructing metaphors together with the patient, rather
than seeking out the roots of abnormal brain function as reflected by ver–
bal productions and helping to correct it. It also leads to concern about
appropriate professional, scientific and intellectual colleagues. If you see
psychoanalysis as rooted in a scientific base, you can screen out people who
don't know or understand science. But if you see it as an activity of con-
