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The Role of the Case Study Method in the Foundations of Psychoanalysis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Adolf Grünbaum
Adolf Grünbaum*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, U.S.A.
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Extract

In my 1984 book on The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, I addressed two main questions: (1) Are the analyst’s observations in the clinical setting reliable as ‘data,’ and (2) if so, can they actually support the major hypotheses of the theory of repression or psychic conflict, which is the cornerstone of the psychoanalytic edifice, as we know? In the book, I argued for giving a negative answer to both of these questions. Clearly, if the evidence from the couch is unreliable from the outset, then this defect alone suffices to jeopardize the very foundations of the clinical theory. But, as I strongly emphasized, even if clinical data were not contaminated by the analyst’s influence, the inability of the psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation by free association to warrant the required sort of causal inferences leaves the major pillars of the theory of psychic conflict ill-supported (1984, 172). Thus, I see a two-fold threat to the psychoanalytic case-study method as a means of scientific inquiry.

It is an immediate corollary of my challenge that it applies not only to Freud’s own original hypotheses, but also to any and all post-Freudian versions of psychoanalysis that rely on his clinical methods of validating causal inferences, though the specific content of their theories of psychic conflict is different. After all, the alteration in the content of the hypotheses hardly makes their validation more secure. Therefore, as Morris Eagle documented in a recent publication (1983), those analysts who have objected to my critique as anachronistic have simply not come to grips with it. For example, such inadequate engagement is present, in my view, in the recent Freud Anniversary Lecture ‘Psychoanalysis as a Science: A Response to the New Challenges,’ given by Robert Wallerstein (1986), the current president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. As he tells us (1988, 6, n.1), ‘The Freud Anniversary Lecture was intended primarily as a response to Grünbaum.’ Yet he does not come to grips at all with the gravamen of my challenge: Even if clinical data could be taken at face value as being uncontaminated epistemically, the inability of the psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation by free association to warrant causal inferences leaves the major pillars of the clinical theory of repression ill-supported.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 623 - 658
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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Footnotes

*

This article is dedicated to Professor Paul K. Feyerabend on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. It is an extensively revised and much enlarged version of the following papers: (1) ‘The Theory of Transference Qua Key Flaw in the Psychoanalytic Case Study Method,’ presented in the ‘Psychoanalytic Dialogue’ Session, held on Dec. 20, 1986 at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Assn. in NYC, and (2) ‘The Role of the Case Study Method in the Foundations of Psychoanalysis’ delivered at the Conference on the Humanities and the Sciences, held at Cornell University in April 1987. The current version is reprinted by permission of L. Nagl and H. Vetter, eds., Die Philosophen und Freud (Vienna: R. O1- denbourg Verlag 1988). Copyright © 1988 by A. Grünbaum.

I am much indebted to Professor Melford E. Spiro, who is both a distinguished anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, for a number of critical comments on the first of the two earlier versions above. His commentary prompted considerable expository clarification of my arguments, and the correction of a nosologic error. I am also grateful to the psychoanalyst Rosemarie Sand for an insightful reading of the earlier version that stimulated me to deal with additional issues.

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