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Pseudoanalysis (fwd)
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From: "Dieter E. Zimmer" <DEZimmer@compuserve.com>
The way some people still seem to confound psychoanalysis with psychology
surprises me. Scientific psychology is an open-ended inquiry into the
workings of the mind, with a multitude of methods that only have to conform
to the scientific standard, empiricism, internal consistency,
falsifiability. Psychoanalysis is a vague body of teachings spread with
religious zeal which eschews empirical confirmation and which, where is has
been reduced to testable hypotheses (which is hard enough), has not been
confirmed, to say the least. Neither has it been confirmed by the success
of the "cures" based on its premises. From American psychiatry where it had
its heyday thirty or forty years ago is has all but disappeared, though of
course it still has its adherents clinging to one or the other of its
revisions. Literary people seem to be the most faithful, converting it into
a kind of all-purpose folk psychology. In their mind, Freud seems to have
discovered sex and death, constructs completely unknown to mankind before
him. So they rejoice when they read a novel where people die and kill or
make love or don't or love or hate their parents or children, taking all
that as proof that Freud thought up the right insights after all. And if
somebody comes along and doubts any of these phony explanations, they take
it as further proof, for psychoanalysis had truly discovered something, the
ultimate trick of discourse: the more one doubts them, the more it
considers its assumptions justified. It's an honor to Nabokov that he saw
through these preposterous claims at a time when that was not fashionable
at all.
Dieter E. Zimmer
The way some people still seem to confound psychoanalysis with psychology
surprises me. Scientific psychology is an open-ended inquiry into the
workings of the mind, with a multitude of methods that only have to conform
to the scientific standard, empiricism, internal consistency,
falsifiability. Psychoanalysis is a vague body of teachings spread with
religious zeal which eschews empirical confirmation and which, where is has
been reduced to testable hypotheses (which is hard enough), has not been
confirmed, to say the least. Neither has it been confirmed by the success
of the "cures" based on its premises. From American psychiatry where it had
its heyday thirty or forty years ago is has all but disappeared, though of
course it still has its adherents clinging to one or the other of its
revisions. Literary people seem to be the most faithful, converting it into
a kind of all-purpose folk psychology. In their mind, Freud seems to have
discovered sex and death, constructs completely unknown to mankind before
him. So they rejoice when they read a novel where people die and kill or
make love or don't or love or hate their parents or children, taking all
that as proof that Freud thought up the right insights after all. And if
somebody comes along and doubts any of these phony explanations, they take
it as further proof, for psychoanalysis had truly discovered something, the
ultimate trick of discourse: the more one doubts them, the more it
considers its assumptions justified. It's an honor to Nabokov that he saw
through these preposterous claims at a time when that was not fashionable
at all.
Dieter E. Zimmer