528
PARTISAN REVIEW
Robert Michels:
You're asking me about the social history of psychoanaly–
sis. I am not an expert, but my impression is that it hasn't actually happened
that way. The growth of interest in seeing psychoanalysis as hermeneutic
rather than a natural science comes from within the core of psychoanalysis.
Paul Ricoeur was probably the one who started the dialogue. People at the
heart of the psychoanalytic community-Roy Schaefer in New York would
be an example--became fascinated by the value of this model of the process
of analysis, as they were rejecting, for internal reasons within the analytic dia–
logue, some of the former natural science concepts.
One of the central figures in the explicit formulation of the natural sci–
entific theory of psychoanalysis was David Rappaport. He wrote the
definitive theoretical textbook. Interestingly, several of the leaders in the
reformulation of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic rather than a natural scien–
tific activity were Rappaport's major students. Now, one can make
interpretations about rebelling against fathers and all that, but from the stand–
point of intellectual history, they were the ones who pushed the natural
science model to its limit. They were troubled by its limitations and searched
for other ways to
think
about what they were doing. They were certainly
richly influenced by changes in the cultural and intellectual world in which
they lived, and in which it was acceptable not to be a scientist.
In
some ways
psychoanalysis was eagerly waiting to disavow its status as a pure natural sci–
ence, but waited until it would not be removed from the intellectual world
by doing so. I don't think the changes were primarly in response to external
criticism. Griinbaum, for example, who has been a major critic of psycho–
analysis as a natural science, is actually far more hostile to the model of
psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline.
Morris Dickstein:
When you described Crews as having fallen into a naive
idealization decades ago, that position is something which most of the psy–
choanalytic community then would have gone along with. So, in fact,
psychoanalysis itself was at another place at that time. Crews has moved one
hundred and eighty degrees. I think psychoanalysis has moved ninety degrees.
Robert Michels:
Certainly thirty or forty years ago the psychoanalytic
community was much more eager to defend its natural science status and
embraced any outsider who agreed with it. It was also much more homoge–
nous, with a much narrower range of views. Those two things have
changed radically.
Edith Kurzweil:
To what extent to you think psychoanalysis has changed
in terms of diagnoses? Freud started out treating hysterics, and then, to put
it very globally, came diagnoses of obsessive compulsives, borderline and
