The Generation of Psychoanalytic Knowledge: Sociological and Clinical Perspectives Part One:'Give Me a Consulting Room ?' 1 (original) (raw)

1997, British Journal of Psychotherapy

This paper examines the contradiction between the advances of psychoanalysis over the near century since Freud invented it, and its apparent divergence from the procedures of the other sciences. It argues that developments in the sociology and history of science since the 1960s enable the different dimensions of scientific activity to be more objectively identified. The work of Bruno Latour is discussed, focusing on his account of the laboratory as the key site of scientific discovery, and leading to a comparison between the laboratory and the psychoanalytic consulting room. However, significant differences between laboratory-based science and psychoanalysis are also pointed out. The most important of these is the degree to which the control of the outside world routinely sought by normal sciences is made impossible and undesirable for psychoanalysis by its distinctive commitment to the autonomy of its human subjects. This article argues that psychoanalysis has developed since its`revolutionary' invention in the form of a`normal science' (Kuhn 1962). It argues that, through the routinized procedures of its clinical consulting room, psychoanalysis has been fertile in developing new theories and techniques. This model of how psychoanalysis works, grounded in the sociology of science, is illustrated with examples of some key discoveries within the British psychoanalytical tradition. The linked article which follows, by Susan Reid, offers examples of some contemporary new developments in the psychoanalytic understanding of autism. These ideas, like the earlier examples given, are based on the evidence of the clinical consulting room, but also on another setting, infant observation, which is proposed as an additional site for empirical psychoanalytic study. There is a disjunction between the remarkable success of psychoanalysis as an intellectual and professional practice, since its invention by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century, and its lack of legitimation by the conventional canons of scientific method. How can a form of investigation and clinical practice which is, according to its critics, so deeply flawed have not only survived, but grown to assume the appearance of a mature scientific inquiry? Has this been merely a giant deception practised on a gullible and needy public? (The recurrent attacks on Freud's intellectual honesty, e.g. Crews et al. (1995) , display this suspicion.) Or is it, as Ernest Gellner (1985) has suggested, an instance of the attraction of non-rational forms of thinking in a world being transformed by`modernizing' forces-not a form of science but part of a reaction