Psychoanalysis

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Is psychoanalysis a science? Does it have any relevance today (clinically, experimentally etc.)?

-- Sierra Jamieson (syke930@hotmail.com), October 19, 2002

Answers

psycholoanalysis is science because psycholoanalysis study about human thinking and what is his problems and then treat like doctors

-- rabia (rabia_khan32@hotmail.com), October 20, 2002.

I would venture to say that virtually no scientists who are not themselves connected to psychoanlaysis in some way currently regard psychoanalysis as a science. (Of course, it depends on whether how you're using the term "science". In North America and the UK it tends to be limited to empirical -- even just experimental -- studies. On the Continenet, however, the term -- or rather its foreign-language equivalents -- tends to be used more broadly to denote any serious scholarly pursuit, whether empirical, experimental, or otherwise.) Psychoanalysis itself is no longer a unified discipline and some groups of psychoanalysts themselves would not claim to be doing science. There was a time when this was not the case -- certainly Freud considered his work to be scientific and when psychoanalysis was the dominant form of psychiatry (prior to the 1950s) it was more widely (though never universally) viewed as being a branch of science. Today, however, I think it is fair to say that that this no longer so.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), October 20, 2002.

In response to the second part of your question, yes, it has considerable relevance. There are many practitioners of new schools of psychoanalysis in the world of psychiatry, clinical psychology, clinical social work, etc. A variety of psychoanalytic institutes teach everything from traditional Freudian approaches to the works of Klein and Bion, to the self psychology of Kohut, and the subjectivity theory of Stolorow and Atwood and their colleagues. Much of psychoanalytic theory has been absorbed into popular culture. It is very heavily used in literary criticism, partly because writers use it so extensively, often implicitly, in their writing. An interesting analysis of this is Gardner Murphy's "The Current Impact of Freud Upon Psychology" in the American Psychologist, 1956, 11(2), 663-671. Murphy's comments still ring true. I am a clinician myself, and though I reject much of Freudian theory, there is no argument about his profound influence in developing a theory of dream interpretation and advancing the notion of the unconscious.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), October 21, 2002.

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