Psychoanalysis

• Human sciences include disciplines aiming at studying the peculiarity of human beings such as intentionality, agentivity, and meaning making.
• The methodological approach of human sciences entails that the peculiarity of the object recommends the peculiarity of method.
• Natural sciences are nomothetic, aiming to discover general features of events.
• Human sciences, aimed at the peculiarity of objects, also recommend the specificity of the method.
• The rigor of the justification processes in human sciences is comparable to the rigor of the control procedures exhibited by natural sciences.
• The more human specificity is taken into account, the less the requirements of rigor and objectivity are.
• The need to preserve subjectivity and the need to adopt rigorous control procedures are both elements present in psychoanalysis.
• Freud, a neurologist by education, aimed for psychology as an experimental science, provided with those empirical correlations that a neuroscientist might wish for.
• Freud was a positivist and believed on the criteria of justification, but soon discovered that neurological explanations of hysterical symptoms turned out to be unsatisfying.
• Freud dealt with the subjective dimension of the psychic experience, which was not considered as a weakness or a sign of irrationality.
• Freud highlighted that his theory was rigorous enough to be considered legitimate and autonomous.
• Psychoanalytic theories have been stimuli to reflect on the demarcation criteria between science and pseudo-science.
• Popper linked the critique to psychoanalysis to the issue of the demarcation principle (i.e., falsifiability), asking if these theories are scientific or pseudo-scientific.
• Popper demonstrated that inductivism cannot be properly justified, and that the method of psychoanalysis is inductive, which is why he was very critical towards it.
• Eliminative inductivism states that when the aim is controlling a causal link between two variables, it is necessary to take into account a mixture of positive and negative cases.
• A valid inductive control will exclude that symptoms’ remission is caused by methods other than the psychoanalytic method.
• Grunbaum considers psychoanalysis as a “bad science”, a discipline which is in principles falsifiable, which make use of induction, another scientific theory, but it doesn’t work so well.
• According to Grunbaum, psychoanalysis should be put into the laboratory in order to test different groups undergo different treatment.
• In the case of mister smith’s missed pregnancy, it is possible that other factors may be responsible in determining symptoms’ remission, such as placebo effect or the simple fact that Mr Smith is male and males can’t get pregnant.
• In order to formulate a valid causal link, it is necessary to specify a large n of conditions possibly having a casual effect.
• According to Grunbaum, it is not enough to specify just one condition, but a large n of conditions need to be necessarily specified.
• The method of evaluation of symptoms remission must be the same and those outcome should be compared by statistical method.
• In clinical settings, it is not possible to control for a large n of conditions possibly having a casual effect.
• Symptoms remit by the repression alleviation [T], but does this mean that the etiological theory [E] is justified by T?
• Psychoanalysis has the chance to improve, it is not a pseudoscience.
• Grunbaum aims at two targets: rejecting the tally argument formulated by Freud and supporting the central role of (eliminative) inductivism in science, against Popper.
• Psychoanalysis has been often rejected (i.e., falsified) when controlled in extra- clinical settings.
• P = pathogen (i.e., repressed homosexuality) - N = neurosis (i.e., paranoid delusions).
• Freud was aware of the contamination of clinical data, but he couldn't fix the problem within the clinical setting.
• Psychoanalysis is falsifiable because any instance of N who had not been subjected to P will falsify the etiological hypothesis.
• Freud believed that the psychic cause of paranoid delusion was repressed homosexuality.
• Method of Free Association is the main method used to enter the individual’s subconscious.
• There is a woman who shows paranoid delusion without having a repressed homosexuality.
• If paranoid delusions are found without any sign of repressed homosexuality, this will be a kind of falsification and psychoanalysis will be falsifiable.
• Grunbaum rigorizes the Freudian argument by identifying two hypotheses linked by a probatory relation: Therapeutic hypothesis T: the cathartic process of repression’s alleviation related to traumatic memories is causally relevant for symptoms to disappear and Etiological hypothesis E: a current repression, associated with affect suppression, is causally necessary for the initial pathogenesis and for the conservation of a neurosis.
• Free association identifies the unconscious causes (etiology) of behavior, both pathological and normal.
• The deduction of T from E is sufficient to say that T is inductive evidence of E.
• Freud argues that the therapeutic success of the free association method is fundamental in order to guarantee the correctness of our method as being able to provide a causal confirmation in etiological research in psychopathology.
• G agrees with Popper about the contamination of clinical data, but he insists that Freud was aware of this problem.
• Freud formulated an argument, the tally argument, to defend the methodological validity of the psychoanalytic procedures.