Vol. 65 No. 4 1998 - page 595

LOUIS
A.
SASS
595
in Freud's theorizing. Their arguments demonstrate the one-sidedness of
Adolf G6mbaum's critique of Karl Popper's denial of the scientific status
of psychoanalysis because of what Popper saw as its empirical unfalsifiabil–
ity, as well as of Grunbaum's own, rather tendentious portrayal of Freud as
a would-be empiricist or falsificationist. It is true that some of Freud's
claims-such as Grunbaum's favorite example, Freud's association of para–
noia with male homosexuality-may generate refutable predictions, a
point Wittgenstein acknowledges; but there are many other claims that
clearly do not generate such predictions.
Wittgenstein's remarks on psychoanalysis are occasional, unsystematic,
and primarily critical in intent; he never wrote a sustained treatise on the
topic.
It
is therefore difficult to say with confidence what his positive rec–
ommendations for psychoanalysis might be. But it is clear that
Wittgenstein's attitude toward frameworks of understanding that are
empirically irrefutable is far more tolerant than Popper's (Wittgenstein, we
might recall, is a major source for Thomas Kuhn's notion of the paradigm).
What Wittgenstein criticizes is not the
adoption
of such frameworks, but
only Freud's tendency to mistake them for empirical assertions.
It
also
seems unlikely that he would adopt a postmodern position, arguing that
psychoanalysis can, in fact, always and only be a form of rhetoric or per–
suasion, offering a merely mythological, narrative, or esthetically pleasing
account.
It
is difficult, however, to go much beyond these two points-to
say, for instance, whether Wittgenstein would have recommended using
psychoanalytic assumptions and frameworks to generate empirical hypothe–
ses of a genuinely scientific sort, or whether he viewed the domain of
human motivation as (like history) too particularistic and context-bound,
too multifarious, elusive, and value-imbued, to allow for the possibility of
meaningful, non-platitudinous generalizations about human motivation.
On this last view, psychoanalytic explanations, like historical ones, might be
real enough, even though necessarily
ad hoc
and el ucidatory rather than
rule-bound, general, or predictive. One can find in Wittgenstein's com–
ments on psychoanalysis evidence that he favored each of the last two
views. My own opinion is that Wittgenstein, the almost instinctual enemy
of over-generalization, would have refused to choose between these alter–
natives, arguing that psychoanalysis is really a heterogeneous perspective
that involves scientific (or at least proto-scientific)
as well as
more purely
hermeneutical elements.
The question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis has traditional–
ly been supposed to be bound up with the issue of what sort of
explanation it offers-whether, to be specific, it accounts for human action
by invoking reasons or by invoking causes. As Bouveresse notes in the
chapter he devotes to the reasons-versus-causes issue, Wittgenstein was
512...,585,586,587,588,589,590,591,592,593,594 596,597,598,599,600,601,602,603,604,605,...689
Powered by FlippingBook