what is science? what is psychoanalysis? what is to be done?

BJP/FREUD MUSEUM CONFERENCE - `SCIENCE' ANDPSYCHOANALYSIS

WHAT IS SCIENCE? WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYSIS?WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Joseph Schwartz

Introduction

I want to thank the Freud Museum and the British Journal of Psychotherapy for puttingtogether such a timely conference. Recent attacks on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy haveinvariably raised the question of the scientific credibility of psychoanalysis, a charge that isso clouded over by an ignorance of science that it hs been difficult to formulate an adequateresponse. I have been particularly struck by the spectacle of novelists like Fay Weldon andliterary critics like Frederick Crews confidently accusing psychoanalysis of being unscientificwithout their giving any evidence that they know anything at all about science.

Nevertheless the charge seems to stick. We all seem to believe at some level thatpsychoanalysis may not be scientific in the usual way but .... Following the `but' are a numberof responses: but psychoanalysis is valid in its own right; but psychoanalysis is trying tobecome more scientific by doing controlled studies; but psychoanalysis is an hermeneutic artand not a science at all and it is just not fair to judge it by the strict standards of science.

All these responses accept uncritically a notion of a science that is objective, precise and,above all, certain. Such a science is a mythic science, not a real science, a myth thatoriginated with the formation of the Royal Society in 1660 following the Restoration and thatbecame consolidated in the late 19th century with the public relations activities of theMovement for the Endowment of Research in Britain and the American Association for theAdvancement of Science in the United States.

There is a dual aspect of science, long known to working scientists. There is a set ofactual practices and bodies of knowledge that bring us into more intimate engagement withthe natural world. And there is a set of social representations of science, an ideology ofscience, which in these debates is frequently called a positivist view of science. When FayWeldon calls psychoanalysis unscientific she calls upon the ideology of science in an attemptto discredit psychoanalysis. She knows and we know that it is a very bad thing to beunscientific. How can we trust something that is unscientific?

So is psychoanalysis scientific or not? Well, if we want to respond to this question in anydepth, we had better be sure we know a little more than we do at present about what it meansto be scientific.

JOSEPH SCHWARTZ PhD is a member of the Centre for Attachment-based PsychoanalyticPsychotherapy. Address for correspondence: 2 Lancaster Drive, London NW3 4HA.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol 13(1), 1996© The author

54 British Journal of Psychotherapy (1996) 13(1)

What Is Science?

John Berger's famous essay Ways of Seeing gave us a concise way to conceptualize thesocial activity of painting as a way of seeing. In the same vein, we can define literature as away of telling, dance as a way of moving, architecture as a way of building. And so in thisway we can define science as a way of understanding. The social practice of science has asits object the creation of effective ways to understand our experience of the natural world.

Obviously all definitions have their limitations. But one advantage of defining science asa way of understanding is that we can immediately see the relationship between science andart and between science and religion.

Science is that part of our culture that is devoted to the creation of understandings ofhuman experience. Art in all its manifestations is a way of representing or communicatinghuman experience. However religion is a way of understanding also. But the differencebetween science and religion is that science seeks its understandings of the material world inthe material world itself while religion seeks its understandings of the material world inforces that lie outside the material world. In a somewhat old-fashioned way of putting it,science is materialist while religion is idealist.

To give this definition the texture it needs to be useful for a discussion of psychoanalysisI want to give two vignettes from the well-known sciences of astronomy and palaeontology.Here we have a picture of a beautiful spiral galaxy taken through the 200-inch telescope atMount Palomar in California (see Figure 1). Is this science? Is the simple observation of thisstructure science? There are no controlled

Figure 1. Spiral galaxy NGC 628 in Pisces (courtesy Hale Observatories)

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experiments and no quantitative measurements. Just the observation of a natural structurewith the aid of a sophisticated, complex instrument. It could be said, however, that unlike theobservations in the consulting-room this observation is objective. After all one just looksthrough the telescope and sees.

For example, take the planet Jupiter. Imagine a lovely picture showing the bandedstructure of the planet's methane and ammonia atmosphere as well as the giant red spot. Nowimagine a little dot of light on the lower left. This is Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons. Onthe night of 6 January in the year 1610 when Galileo first pointed his little 2-inch telescope atthe brightest object then appearing in the night sky, he saw Ganymede and three other moonsof Jupiter. The evidence was little flecks of light like this, flecks that on successive nightsapparently moved. Critics argued that the observations were artefacts of the instrument. Onefamous critic of the time was the philosopher Cesare Cremonini. A year later on 6 May 1611,Paolo Gualdo, Galileo's colleague at the University of Padua, wrote to Galileo: '[Cremonini]entirely ridicules these observations of yours and is amazed that you assert them as true'.Seventy years later in 1681, after Galileo had established modern astronomy with hisobservations of the moons of Jupiter, sunspots, the phases of Venus, and the craters on themoon, John Flamsteed, the English Astronomer Royal at the Greenwich Observatory, stillfound it necessary to argue that lens systems `do not impose upon our senses'. Seventeenth-century audiences needed to be won over to the reality of the world revealed by the telescopenot entirely unlike our needing to win over audiences to the reality of the world revealed bythe analytic hour.'

Let us return to the galaxies. Everything we learn about these structures comes from thelight that we receive from them. There is no question of the controlled experiments which arecommonly thought to be an indispensable component of the so-called scientific method.Nevertheless it is possible to learn quite a lot by working with what one has got, in this caseby measuring the frequencies of the light we receive. Out of the mixture of light receivedfrom distant galaxies it proves possible to identify the spectra of various elements, hydrogen,helium, iron and so on. Interestingly, the spectra received from the galaxies indicate that thesource of light is moving away from the receiver. Thus the light from the distant galaxies canbe interpreted as being due to the possibility that the galaxies are receding from us. And evenmore interestingly, although the measurements are very difficult to do with accuracy, thevelocity of recession is proportional to how far they are from us. The galaxies that arefurthest away are moving fastest, which is exactly what one would see if all the matter in theuniverse exploded from a common source with different velocities at some time in the past.

Assuming that the universe did begin in a big bang, these measurements give anapproximate age to the entire universe of about 18 billion years. And so we see that just fromthe `simple' observation and measurement of the frequencies of light received from distantgalaxies we can make the dramatic inference that the universe has a finite age.

Nevertheless one could still say yes, there may not be controlled experiments inastronomy but at least there are precise quantitative measurements. So astronomy wouldappear to be a science, an observational science, perhaps not an experimental science but ascience nonetheless. But what then about palaeontology?

Consider palaeontology. In the nineteenth century western Europeans, through theeconomically important, subjects of botany, geology and world exploration, were becomingaware of the great variety of the world's plant life and the history of the earth


itself on more realistic time-scales. Part of the geological explorations of the time involvedthe unearthing of bones and fossil imprints.

Here is a fossil find of a mess of bones from Devon in 1834 (see Figure 2). Put the bonestogether and we get a construction of an iguanodon (see Figure 3). Even more famous is thereconstruction of the diplodocus. Well, what are we to make of the reconstruction ofiguanodon and diplodocus. Is this science? There are no controlled experiments. There areno quantitative measurements. There is certainly no predictive power. And yet from thestudy of these bones by the means to hand, we discover the astonishing fact of the pastexistence of the dinosaurs, a fact that changes our conception of our place in the world.

And was it so terribly easy to establish the reality of what could be inferred from thefossil record? The legendary Huxley-Wilberforce debate in 1860 was only one of acontinuing series of struggles and arguments over the meaning of the fossil record. Some ofyou will be familiar with the story of the Burgess Shale told by Stephen Jay Gould. TheBurgess Shale was an extraordinary fossil find that preserved the soft parts of animals.Recent re-examination of this fossil record by Harry Whittington, Conway Morris and othershas permitted the reconstruction of a variety of early life body plans that no longer existincluding the astonishing five-eyed opabinia. The lushness of these early forms, theirsubsequent extinction and the reduction rather than increase of the variety of life forms hasmade for a completely different interpretation of the process of evolution. Instead ofevolution being seen in nineteenth-century terms as a slow steady inevitable march towardssuperior life forms with humans at the top of an

Figure 2. The Maidstone Slab: jumble of iguanodon bones found in 1834 (courtesyMuseum of Natural History)

Figure 3. Reconstructed iguanodon, 1917, from Cretaceous shales on the Isle of Wight (courtesy Museum of Natural History)

evolutionary tree, we now have a far more modest vision of the place of the human being inthe historical development of life. The human is now a mere twig off to the side of thebranching bush of possibilities of a contingent evolutionary history. Needless to say such aninterpretation does not meet with unanimous approval within the field.

With these two vignettes of astronomy and palaeontology in mind let us now see wherepsychoanalysis stands. We can combine the findings of astronomy and palaeontology withgeology to construct the now standard textbook diagram of the history of the entire universe.We have the origin of the universe in the big bang about 18 billion years ago. Following thestill not understood processes of galactic and solar system formation we arrive at theformation of the Earth at about 4.5 million years ago. The next key date is the origin of theearly bacteria and algae, the first life forms at about 3.5 billion years ago. The arrival of lifeintroduces a qualitatively different form of matter, matter that is capable of self-replication.


Where then does psychoanalysis sit in this scheme? Well, it is right about here with theorigin of the early ancestors of the human being. And what are the distinctive properties ofthis form of matter? If we define biology as the study of forms of matter that are capable ofself-replication, how should we define psychoanalysis?

When I was a boy in the Los Angeles of the 1940s much was made of the human thumb.The distinguishing feature of man was his wonderful opposable thumbs which made for oursuperb ability to use tools. Today, as our productive culture slips ever further from our grasp,tool-making has declined in perceived importance and the defining feature of the humananimal is frequently taken to be human consciousness or human language or the wondroushuman mind. In the meantime there are animal studies seeking to show that there are nosharp boundaries between us and the rest of the animal kingdom as evidenced by thecommunications of the whales and dolphins, the linguistic capabilities of the chimpanzeeLucy or the problem-solving abilities of the crow and raven.

We may concede the argument that animals have some sort of capacities for language, fortool-making and for problem-solving that blur the definitions of what it means to be human.Nevertheless we can still define the subject matter of psychoanalysis as the study of matterthat appears about 100,000 years ago in the long narrative of the history of the universe. Andhow then do we go about studying ourselves? What are the questions that interest us? Howdo we find out about ourselves in reliable and useful ways?

So now what happens when we approach matter that appears in the evolution of theuniverse such as tool making, language speaking, conscious matter? We all know theproblems. And we all know, whether we are psychotherapists, psychologists or psychiatrists,the catcalls we receive from other disciplines that consider themselves to be more successfulthan we are. But I would suggest that we taken a lesson from the physicist Max Delbruck,leader of the molecular biologist revolution, teacher of the reformed ornithologist JamesWatson. Delbruck, when faced with similar jibes from the physics community, insisted thatbiological organisms would never be understood in terms of the relatively simple ahistoricalschemes of physics, that, in fact, the variety and detail of biology were not an obstacle to beovercome on the way to the formulation of great general laws but were an integral part of theobject of study. And so it proved to be. Understanding of life processes remains concrete anddetailed, an understanding that is appropriate in a field where each organism is unique intime and place.

What is Psychoanalysis?

Where does psychoanalysis sit in this scheme? Is psychoanalysis a science or not? Well, asJohn Forrester has said, it is very difficult to see what else it could be. Psychoanalysis,through the instrument of the analytic hour, is an attempt to create understandings of humansubjective experience, that is to say understandings of certain properties of forms of matter -us - that appear quite late in the evolution of the universe.

Now what this argument shows is that the real question is not whether psychoanalysis isa science or not but whether the understandings it has created of human subjective life areany good or not. The argument is not about scientific credibility but about credibility fullstop. The charge that psychoanalysis is unscientific needs to be decoded. What does it mean?Is it a way of saying that

Joseph Schwartz 59

psychoanalysis and psychotherapy cannot be trusted? Is it a way to advance the interests ofother cultural forms which in the case of Fay Weldon means the novel. It certainly is a way ofwarning people off. I think the key question that the charge that psychoanalysis is unscientificraises in people's minds is whether psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can be trusted. So canpsychoanalysis be trusted?

Let me remind you that the telescope was not trusted. And so it is when world views areat stake. We live in a culture that continues to have a deep distrust of human emotional life.Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have always had an uphill fight against the distrust ofexposing human feelings, a distrust that is not of our making.

But what of the distrust that is of our making? Are we sure that we have done nothing toearn a measure of distrust, a lack of respect from even sympathetic outsiders? I thinkpsychoanalysis has suffered from a kind of intoxication with its own explanatory schemes.The thrill of being able to explain things like dreams has overwhelmed the question ofwhether the explanations are any good or not. And, when compounded by an intellectuallycorrupt technique of interpreting objections as resistance, the stage was set for an enquiryinto human subjective experience, an exciting new development in the history of humanenquiry, to become stagnant and closed on itself.

What has been systematically missing from psychoanalytic enquiry has been thediscipline and rigour to hold conflicting points of view in mind for long periods of time untiltheir differences can be satisfactorily reconciled. Curiously this capacity to sustain conflictand contradiction is one of the great gifts that psychoanalysis gives to its analysands but wehave had difficulty in bringing this capacity to the discipline itself. In my view we can onlybegin to take ourselves seriously by recognizing that early hubris must give way to the farmore disciplined and rigorous task of not simply making sense of symptoms but of makinggood sense of them.

What Is To Be Done?

What are the barriers to be overcome in our attempts to advance our understanding of whathappens in the analytic hour? Here under the auspices of the Freud Museum I think it entirelyappropriate to discuss the legacy of Sigmund Freud. How often when searching for supportfor an argument have we gone back to Freud? How many papers are peppered withquotations from Freud? How often do we seek validation and acceptance from colleagues (ornot as the case may be) by our knowledge of Freud's arguments?

I think we have become far too comfortable with Freud as a father figure, as a legitimatorand validator of our clinical experience. Paradoxically, it is precisely because of ourunderstanding of the transference, one of the outstanding discoveries of the talking cure, thatwe have not fully assessed how damaging it is to continue to treat Freud as a father figure.We acknowledge that we have transference reactions to Freud and, because we have a theorythat helps us deal with these kinds of reactions, we go no further.

I suggest that we rethink our relationship to Freud. Instead of seeing Freud as the fatherof the movement I suggest we begin to see him as the first theorist of the analytic hour. Freudshowed that it was possible to make sense of what one heard from patients in these prolongedintense encounters and that is one of the most important functions of theory: it enables one tohave sustained intimate contact with experiences that would otherwise be too overwhelming.Without Freud, arguably, early practitioners


attempting to make sense of the complex experience of the therapeutic relationship mighteasily have been overwhelmed and retreated into the more familiar physician's 10-minutebedside chats so often advocated in the literature of the period.

If we see Freud as our first theorist, we may feel freer to struggle with Freud'scontributions and begin to compare his contributions with those of his contemporaries, withthose who came after him in the two generations since his death and with the contributionsof our own generation. We might even be able to give Freud permission to be wrong withoutfearing that psychoanalysis will be damaged. After all, Newton was wrong in absolutelyevery essential.

Consider, for example, the fundamental differences between Freud and Fairbairn. As weknow Fairbairn broke decisively with Freud in 1946 in his famous paper `Object relationsand dynamic structure' in which he argues that libido is not primarily pleasure seeking but isprimarily object seeking, that is to say, relationship seeking. Fairbairn introduced the basis ofhis challenge to Freud by quoting the now famous cry of his patient: `You keep saying that Iwant this and that desire satisfied; but what I really want is a father.' For Fairbairn, pleasureseeking was a degradation of object relations, a seeking of the reduction of the tensions ofunmet relational needs through the secondary satisfactions of the body. As such Fairbairn'stheory stands in fundamental contradiction to the instinctual/drive theories of classicalFreudian psychoanalysis although the tension between instinctual and relational conceptsexists throughout Freud's work almost from the very beginning.

Fairbairn's view could be said to constitute a breakthrough in our understanding offundamental human needs. To say that the human being is an organism that is fundamentallyrelationship seeking goes counter to one of the great myths of modern western culture, themyth of the Man Alone. Although it is possible to trace the origin of this myth of alienatedman to the breakdown of the feudal ideology of the great organic chain of being, my point isthat Fairbairn's clinical work led him to offer a radically new conceptualization of ourfundamental nature as human beings: that we are fundamentally relationship seeking. Weneed human relationships not only to survive but indeed to become human.

Now I personally am persuaded that Fairbairn's view of the human being asfundamentally relationship seeking is a more accurate view of human reality than Freud'sview of the human being as primarily pleasure seeking, seeking the reduction of tensionsarising from the endogenous drives of sexuality and aggression. But there are many who arenot persuaded by Fairbairn, whose experience of life may be very different, who find theirresonance in instinctual drive theories.

As I engage my imagined opponent, I bring to mind extraclinical studies that haveimpressed me such as the literature on wild children who, deprived of human contact asshown in Truffaut's film of the wild child of Aveyron, do not acquire language or sexuality.Or I recall the work of John Bowlby on attachment, separation and loss, or of MaryAinsworth and the strange situation studies continued now at Berkeley by Mary Main andher colleagues. Or I recall the work of Rene Spitz on hospitalism.

But these citations take us into extraclinical studies of the effects of disrupted ordysfunctional attachments, each of which could be plausibly challenged by contrary studiesor by differing interpretations. And so the argument goes, both in and out of the consulting-room, in my opinion with an increasing acceptance of Fairbairn's view that human beingshave a drive toward relationships which, if not met, results in extensive psychopathology inlater life, ranging from the irreparable damage caused

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by minimal attachment in the case of wild children, to the destructive effects of cumulativetrauma at the hands of caregivers, extending to the satisfactory mental health of individualswith, in Bowlby's words, a secure base provided by, in Winnicott's words, good enoughparenting. But are the views of Bowlby, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Sullivan, Kohut and therelational and gender conscious theorists of our own generation better, deeper and moreaccurate than Freud's original formulation? And if so, how would we know?

At one level I think we are unnecessarily mystified about the course that seriousarguments take. We tend to have yet another idealized representation of how it goes inscience. In natural science, we think that evidence is offered, the participants look at it and -presto - a new paradigm comes into being. Such a view is, of course, highly idealized andserves many functions, not least of which is to strengthen science in its role as anunchallengeable voice of authority.

Consider as a counter-example one of the many violent clashes that have accompaniedadvances in physics - a series of bitter exchanges between Ostwald and Boltzmann in the late1890s over the nature of the flow of heat. Ostwald played the role of the old conservative andBoltzmann played the role of the radical innovator. Boltzmann was a professor of physics atthe University of Vienna and was a collaborator with Josef Stefan, Freud's teacher of physics.After an earlier attempt in 1901, Boltzmann committed suicide in 1906, a suicide widelyrecognized to be caused in part by despair about his marginalization in the physicscommunity. Fifty years later Max Planck recalled that he had learned a most important factfrom the Ostwald-Boltzmann dispute, that a new scientific truth does not triumph byconvincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponentsgradually die off and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

So is this where we are at? Are we in the middle of the process of changing paradigmsfrom instinctual to relational points of view with all the stresses that can accompany such amajor change in world view? Now it might be nice to think that all we have to do, in thewords of Gladys Knight and the Pips, is to keep on keeping on and all will be well. But Ithink this approach plays into a quite destructive complacency that has characterized thedevelopment of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. I think we have not come to gripswith our lack of discipline in theory and we have not fully appreciated both the strengths andlimitations of clinical experience.

As John Bowlby emphasized long ago, clinical experience is not sufficient to prove theefficacy of different treatment programmes. This is the presenting problem of all clinicalmedicine. In spite of the advance represented by the introduction of the double blindprotocol, clinical medicine is still lamentably lax about both theory and treatment whether itis the indiscriminate, hazardous prescribing of antibiotics or the vague contentless `diagnosis' of stress or the citing of genetics as the cause of a vast number of chronic healthproblems.

Looked at as a general problem in clinical medicine, we may reasonably ask critics of theefficacy of psychotherapy to offer some controls: how does psychotherapy compare to othertreatments? The history of psychiatry is full of uncontrolled treatment programmes that manyof us regard as barbaric whether it was the pulling of Anna von Lieben's teeth as a cure forher mental anguish in the 1880s, to the use of pre-frontal lobotomies in the 1940s, to thepresent use of ECT as an intervention in clinical depression, to the ubiquitous use of drugregimes in the understaffed wards of our mental hospitals. In this context of arguing aboutthe efficacy of psychotherapy, I


surprise myself by thinking of Winston Churchill who said: 'Yes, democracy is a terriblesystem, except for all the others'.

But the fact is that we do need extraclinical studies to back up and develop what welearn in the consulting-room. What we do not need are studies whose sole claim to ourattention is that they are 'scientific'. As Chris Barker and Nancy Pistraing of UniversityCollege stress in their fine textbook on research methods, much psychological research isdeadly dull. This is because research in psychology is all too frequently more concerned withfollowing preconceived notions about what it means to be scientific than to find out anythingof genuine interest.

With this caveat in mind I think clinicians must be responsive to what we can learnabout clinical issues outside the consulting-room. For example, I think we can all recognizethat the work on infant observation by Daniel Stern in Geneva and Colwyn Trevarthen inEdinburgh has greatly expanded our understanding of the complex and intense patterns ofinteraction that exist between mother and child from the moment of birth, studies that to mymind strongly support Fairbairn's central tenet, that a central human need, a drive if you like,is the need for attachment.

But I do not want to be misunderstood. The clinical situation far from being unreliable isalmost too rich in information to be readily absorbed. That is one reason why clinicians canhang on so hard to theory because it helps us manage the potentially overwhelmingemotional and intellectual aspects of clinic work. Although we may welcome the verifyingaspect of extraclinical studies I would assert that everything that we have learned about howto conceptualize human subjective experience we have learned first from clinical work.Nothing in our present social arrangements has the capacity to replace the analytic hour as asustained protected space for the exploration of human subjective experience. And the reasonfor this is simple. If we want to explore the human subject as a subject we cannot treat thehuman subject as an object as is so frequently the case in research protocols that explicitlyexclude human subjectivity in their pursuit of an idealized objectivity.

Adam Phillips has been one of many clinicians who are concerned to preserve theopenness and possibilities of psychoanalysis by not foreclosing on any of the possible storiespsychoanalysis tells. In this view we accept the narratives we find interesting and compellingand reject those that do not speak to us. But many therapists throw up their hands saying thatwith so many different ways of working, with so many stories and with apparently no way todecide between them, how can we possibly take ourselves seriously as creators of a reliablebody of human knowledge?

Again I think we are unnecessarily mystified about the way differences in point of viewcan work out. I want to close with a last vignette from physics about different ways ofunderstanding. My example is the force of gravity. Gravity can be seen as a force actinginstantaneously across empty space inversely proportional to the distance squared and soforth. This was Newton's view. Or gravity can be seen as being a component part of the so-called action, the difference between the particle's kinetic and potential energy, with aparticle taking exactly that path through space that keeps the total action to a minimum. Thiswas the view of Lagrange a century later who disliked Newton's low-brow mathematics. Orgravity can be seen as field spread out through space, the view adopted after Faraday'sexperiments with magnetism. Or gravity can be seen as the curvature of space caused by thepresence of a mass. This was Einstein's view. All students of physics learn that the metaphorsof the first three views are completely equivalent. They are just different words describingthe same thing. But

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Einstein's view is more complete because it takes into account the fact that there are noinstantaneous interactions across a distance in nature.

Are any of our views in psychoanalysis more complete than the others? Or are ourdiffering stories different metaphors for saying the same thing? One hundred years afterFreud, I believe we have arrived at a point where it has become possible to engage in aconstructive conflict about human subjective experience. I think we no longer have to treatFreud as a father but can treat him as a colleague, as the first theorist of the analytic hour. Ithink we are now mature enough to begin to look for ways to engage each other's metaphorsand to handle all the difficult and threatening feelings that must inevitably accompany asearch for deeper understanding of ourselves, of our place in the world and of our capacity forchange.

Note

1. The objections of Galileo's critics were far from trivial. Consider, for example, a problem thatbothered Galileo's audience. The Earth was meant to rotate on its axis once every 24 hours. With theEarth's circumference of about 25,000 miles the velocity at the equator is over 1000 miles an hour. Whyare we then not blown about by huge winds as the Earth spins through its atmosphere and why are we notthrown off the earth's surface at these tremendous velocities? I wonder how many of us today couldproduce convincing answers to this argument?

what is science? what is psychoanalysis? what is to be done?

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