NATHAN G. HALE,]R.
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transcripts of psychoanalytic sessions in which free association was used,
which, as far as I can determine, they fail to do. Finally, Macmillan seems
to assume that the analyst gives the patient a topic about which he must
collect associations; but this is the very opposite of Freud's procedure, since
he carefully explained to the patient that he was to say whatever came to
mind. He let his patient's associations take their own course, which he
regarded as essential to the work of analysis.
Freud appealed to far more than clinical evidence or evidence from
successful treatment to support his hypotheses. He was far from being a
therapeutic enthusiast, although some of his papers into the 1920s
expressed considerable confidence in the therapeutic success of psycho–
analysis. Toward the end of his life his therapeutic pessimism grew
markedly. Surely Paul Robinson is right to argue that Adolf Gruenbaum
exaggerated the importance Freud placed on the "tally argument," i.e., that
therapeutic success proved the validity of clinical interpretations and of
psychoanalysis in general.
Freud appealed to wide varieties of evidence for his theories, some of
which would hardly be considered corroboration today. He collected what
he took to be supporting data from literature, religion, contemporary
anthropology and social psychology, from dreams and slips, the "psy–
chopathology of everyday life," even from the direct observation of
children. He cited the psychological experiments of Viennese disciples
corroborating his theories of distortion and symbolism. He once even
expressed the wish that Otto Rank had compiled "statistical data compar–
ing the mentality of first-born children, those who had especially difficult
births and those born by means of Caesarian section," before publishing his
birth trauma theory.
Freud's grounds for confirming causal hypotheses seem to have been
the overall fit of converging pieces of evidence. As Robinson has suggest–
ed, psychoanalysis is a hybrid, operating between science and the
humanities, but not identical with either. But this does not mean that psy–
choanalytic hypotheses cannot be confirmed or falsified.
It
means simply
that physics as a model science for psychoanalysis may be entirely inappro–
priate and that, as Ernst Mayr holds, biology or the social sciences may
come closer.
And how many social scientists agree on the "truth" of their theories?
The disagreements among economists and psychologists about fundamen–
tal theory are notorious.
Finally, Macmillan ignores many important developments in modern
psychoanalysis, including the clinical and some of the experimental litera–
ture. He makes much of the disagreements among psychoanalysts about
both theory and clinical practice and interpretation. These surely are rife
