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- Psychoanalysis is not verifiable – continual contradictions and no base criteria Tuck , 2014
Not FalsifiablePyschoanalysis is non-falsifiable hindsight thinking Samuels 93—Training Analyst – Society of Analytical Psychology and Science Associate – American Academy of Psychoanalysis (Andrew, Free Associations, “The mirror and the hammer: depth psychology and political transformation”, Vol. 3D, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing) DJ The paper is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of political change. It is a contribution to the longstanding ambition of depth psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that will, in Freud's words, 'under-stand the riddles of the world'. It has to be admitted that there is an equally longstanding reluctance in the non-psychological commun¬ity to accept the many and varied ideas and suggestions concerning political matters that have been offered by analysts of all persua¬sions. I do not believe this can all be put down to resistance. There is something offensive above reductive interpretations of complex socio-political problems in exclusively psychological terms. The tendency to panpsychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led me to wonder if an adequate methodology and ethos actually exists with which to make an engagement of depth psychology with the public sphere possible.¶ By 'politics' I mean the arrangements within a culture for the organization and distribution of power, especially economic power, and the way in which power is deployed to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life. Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and representation as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food and water. On a more personal level, political power reflects the ability to choose freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation. 'Politics' refers to the interplay between the personal and public dimensions of power. That is, there is an articulation between public, economic power and power as expressed on the personal, private level. This articulation is demonstrated in family organization, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals. (I have also tried to be consistent in my use of the terms 'culture', 'society' and 'collective'.)'¶ Here is an example of the difficulty with psychological rcduc-tionism to which I am referring. At a conference 1 attended in London in 1990, a distinguished psychoanalyst referred to the revolutionary students in Paris in 1968 as 'functioning as a regressive group'. Now, for a large group of students to be said to regress, there must be, in the speaker's mind, some sort of normative developmental starting point for them to regress to. The social group is supposed to have a babyhood, as it were. Similarly, the speaker must have had in mind the possibility of a healthier, progressive group process — what a more mature group of revolutionary students would have looked like. But complex social and political phenomena do not conform to the individualistic, chronological, moralistic, pathologizing framework that is often imported.¶ The problem stems from treating the entire culture, or large chunks of it, as if it were an individual or, worse, as if it were a baby. Psychoanalysts project a version of personality development couched in judgemental terms onto a collective cultural and political process. If we look in this manner for pathology in the culture, we will surely find it. As we are looking with a psychological theory in mind, then, lo and behold, the theory will explain the pathology, but this is a retrospective prophecy (to use a phrase of Freud's), twenty-twenty hindsight. In this psychoanalytic tautologizing there is really nothing much to get excited about. Too much psychological writing on the culture, my own included, has suffered from this kind of smug 'correctness' when the 'material' proves the theoretical point. Of course it does! If we are interested in envy or greed, then we will find envy or greed in capitalistic organization. If we set out to demonstrate the presence of archetypal patterns, such as projection of the shadow, in geopolitical relations, then, without a doubt, they will seem to leap out at us. We influence what we analyse and so psychological reflection on culture and politics needs to be muted- there is not so much 'aha!' as one hoped. Psychoanalysis is not verifiable – continual contradictions and no base criteria Tuck, 2014, B.S. from University of Michigan, (Andrew, “Why Did American Psychiatry Abandon Psychoanalysis?”, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107788/antuck.pdf?sequence=1) To say that psychoanalysis has grown stagnant as a scientific field may at first seem a sweeping and completely unwarranted claim. After all, in terms of producing new branches of thought, psychoanalytic theory has undoubtedly proven an expansive and fruitful domain; to argue that psychoanalytic progress suddenly stopped after Freud would require answering to object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to name but a few. Furthermore, rather than dying with Freud in 1939, psychoanalysis produced these subfields through a variety of different thinkers—the role of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Heinz Kohut, and Jacques Lacan in their respective theories above seem to demonstrate that psychoanalysis was not a one-man show after all. In fact, it was during the decades immediately following Freud’s death that dynamic psychiatry was at the peak of its influence in the United States. 11,12 Given the proliferation of new models and theories of psychoanalytic thought under an equally diverse group of psychoanalysts, on what grounds could the argument that psychoanalysis failed to produce visible and useful knowledge possibly possess any merit? The answer is in the question: it was precisely the sheer amount and diversity of psychoanalytic subfields that delegitimized psychoanalysis as a whole: the presence of such diversity of opinion within the same field undermined the authority of any one subfield. Rather than adding to a collective fund of psychoanalytic knowledge, each of these different subfields took a different approach to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Former American Psychiatric Association president Alan Stone said: Today, at least in my opinion, and I am not entirely alone in thinking this, neither Anna Freud's Ego Psychology nor Melanie Klein's Object Relations Theory seem like systematic advances on Freud's ideas. Rather they seem like divergent schools of thought, no closer to Freud than Karen Horney who rebelled against Freudian orthodoxy. 13 The frequent emergence of these competing “divergent schools of thought” and their dissenting followers, then, made any developments in psychoanalysis seem to other scientists less like legitimate scientific discoveries and more like competing hypotheses. In contrast with more established fields like biology, innovations in psychoanalysis often seemed to contradict earlier psychoanalytic ideas as well as one another, frequently forming branches and sub-branches without regard to maintaining any sort of continuity or internal consistency in psychoanalysis as a whole. 14,15 In fact, many of these developments were reactionary in nature, responding to other trends in psychoanalysis rather than to new clinical data. This is the case of Heinz Kohut’s development of self psychology, which was a reaction against the subfields of ego psychology and classical drive theory. The revival of American interest in the work of Melanie Klein in the second half of the twentieth century has also been described as a reaction against ego psychology. 16 Furthermore, never did one of these new theories thoroughly abrogate and replace a previous one in the way that, for example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity transformed Newtonian physics. This is not to say that a new idea in psychoanalysis would not have been met with resistance upon its introduction; however, it soon proved that psychoanalysis on the whole lacked the tools that other disciplines had to debunk or prove new theories. By what criteria could psychoanalysts reject or accept a new hypothesis? In physics, a new model was expected to be compatible with currently available data, as well as able to make predictions to be confirmed by observation17; similarly, a new pharmaceutical drug was expected to prove itself by beating a control in a double-blind trial. But such criteria, even if psychoanalysts wanted to use them, were not as conveniently applied to unconscious phenomena proposed by psychoanalysis. Even the gathering of data from clinical psychotherapy was typically unable to resolve the conflict between two competing subfields; problematically, any clinical data that could potentially prove the efficacy of one psychoanalytic school could be interpreted to support others as well. 18 In an article for Psychoanalytic Psychology, psychologist Robert Holt, even as he argued for the validity of psychoanalysis as a “testable scientific theory,”19 admitted the difficulty of producing data that could settle disputes between psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic theories, let alone between schools within psychoanalysis: Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.71 Mb. 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