John Gray
reviews The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani. Upon reflection, one is led to the conclusion that it never quite became the scientific field he wanted it to be:
Where Freud is distinctive is in the way that his thinking departed from the scientific model he thought psychoanalysis should emulate. Partly because human interactions are not repeatable in the way experiments in the natural sciences can be repeated, the practice of psychoanalysis is hard to square with standard versions of scientific method. Rather than being a disability peculiar to psychoanalysis this difficulty is a feature of the social studies in general, and invites the question of whether all branches of knowledge are to be judged by the standards that apply in natural science.
The question is all the more pertinent when it is recognised that there is no agreement as to what these standards may be. Popper's sublimely simple criterion of falsification is rejected by many philosophers, including many who insist on repeatability. It is also at odds with much that is known of the history of science. If Freud's thinking deviates from narrow standards of scientific rectitude, it has this failing in common with much of the science that has been done over the centuries.
Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are right that Freud never ceased hoping that the discipline he founded would be accepted as a science. They omit to explore the ways in which Freud's own thinking undermined this hope. The hard and fast distinction between science and other modes of thinking he insisted on became blurred and ambiguous when, in some of his later writings, he considered how aspects of Jewish religion, such as the insistence on the invisibility of God (which Freud believed promoted the insight that parts of the mind are inaccessible to conscious awareness), may have made psychoanalysis possible. This readiness to break out of the box of his own aspirations and assumptions is one reason why Freud remains such an interesting thinker. It is also a reason for not being too quick to hold the founder of psychoanalysis responsible for the discipline's later development. Referring to the attempts Freud made to control how the history of psychoanalysis would be written, the authors write: 'The aim of Freud's history [of psychoanalysis] was to establish this autocratic political authority.' But whether or not Freud harboured these autocratic tendencies, he was not all of one piece. Some of the dogmatism of Freudian orthodoxies may be a genuine intellectual inheritance. Equally, so are the many divergent lines of inquiry that Freud's thought has inspired.
