Building Out into the Dark

Theory and Observation in Science and Psychoanalysis

Robert Caper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415466806
• eBook ISBN: 9781317723523
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Robert Caper provides the reader with an introduction to psychoanalysis focusing explicitly on whether psychoanalysis is part of the sciences, and if not, where it belongs.

Many psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have considered their discipline a science. In this book, Caper examines this claim and investigates the relationship of theory to observation in both philosophy and the experimental sciences and explores how these observations differ from those made in psychoanalytic interpretation. Building Out into the Dark also explores topics including:

• the origins of psychoanalysis in the art of medicine
• the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis
• the archaic superego
• psychoanalysis with the individual and groups
• what makes psychoanalytic work unique.

Building Out into the Dark offers a thoughtful consideration of the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge and how it is gained. The book's accessible and concise style makes it a useful introductory resource for students studying psychoanalysis, for psychotherapists who are curious about the distinction between psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy as well as those interested in placing psychoanalysis in the context of current cultural and intellectual developments.

1
Introduction

When we hear the word science, we usually think of something like physics, chemistry, astronomy or geology – "hard" sciences that deal with objects that can be apprehended directly through the five senses. Practitioners of these sciences make observations about the natural world, formulate theories or hypotheses about what they observe, and test competing hypotheses against one another using a regular method that they and their colleagues accept as valid.

Of the boundless variety of things the world presents for observation, relatively few count as scientific evidence. Legitimate evidence in a scientific discipline consists only of observations that scientists may use to support or undermine some scientific hypothesis.

In other words, observations must pass through a screen before they can count as scientific evidence. The screen consists of the very scientific hypotheses and theories that scientists test with their observations: only those observations that fit these hypotheses and theories either positively or negatively – as confirmation or refutation – count as evidence. At the same time, only hypotheses or theories that are subject to confirmation or refutation by this evidence qualify as legitimate.

This apparent circularity does not mean that science, which regularly makes new and unexpected discoveries, is circular. But it does mean that science is circumscribed. In any scientific discipline, only certain types of theories – those that can match up with legitimate evidence – are allowed. At the same time, only certain types of observation – those that match up with legitimate theories – are admitted. (The cosmologist James Jeans summed up this state of affairs by admonishing his students, only half jokingly, never to accept a new observation until it had been thoroughly checked against existing theory.) Theories and observations that do not fit together in this way lie beyond the scope of scientific disciplines.

The "hard" sciences explore phenomena that scientists can apprehend with their physical senses, control for purposes of experimental manipulation and study in numbers large enough to permit rigorous statistical analysis. For example, the question whether Type I, Type II or Type III pneumococcus is the most virulent cause of pneumonia in humans is a legitimate one because scientists can observe pneumococci and their effects through the five senses and can replicate pneumococci at will, thereby providing themselves with vast numbers of identical individuals they can manipulate experimentally. Thanks to these vast numbers, they can analyze the results of such experiments using powerful statistical tools. The observation of large numbers of material objects in controlled experimental settings makes hard science durable, precise and reliable.

One of the things we tend not to think of when we hear the word science is psychoanalysis. At first glance, this seems unremarkable. What could be more different from a scientist working in a laboratory filled with esoteric apparatus than two individuals in a room having a conversation? And psychoanalysis indisputably lacks the elements characteristic of hard science.

In place of objects perceptible to the senses, it studies objects perceptible to sensibility. What we perceive through the senses ("any of the faculties by which stimuli from outside or inside the body are received and felt, as the faculties of hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste, and equilibrium") are material objects. What we perceive through our sensibilities ("mental or emotional responsiveness toward something, such as the feelings of another; refined awareness and appreciation in matters of feeling") are immaterial objects: states of mind, beauty, grace, ugliness, good and evil, values.

Psychoanalysis explores the depths of single, unique human minds. It does not study identical objects in numbers large enough to permit controlled experimentation or statistical analysis of results.

Despite these obvious differences, many psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have considered their discipline a science. This judgment was certainly less than accurate. It would be tempting to dismiss it as naive if such a dismissal were not itself naive.

The connections and disconnections between science and psychoanalysis are more complex and interesting than the image of the white coated scientist and the tweed coated psychoanalyst would suggest. Both psychoanalysis and science formulate theories or hypotheses; both filter observations through some kind of screen before admitting them as evidence; and both have regular criteria for testing hypotheses against evidence. In psychoanalysis, as in hard science, only certain types of theories – those that can match up with legitimate evidence – are allowed, and only certain types of observation – those that match up with legitimate theories – are admitted. But because of the differences between information that enters through our senses and information that enters through our sensibilities, psychoanalysts must use a fundamentally different kind of "matching" between hypotheses and evidence: in place of controlled experimentation psychoanalysis uses naturalistic observation and in place of statistical analysis, it uses hunch-based reasoning.

Doesn’t this settle the matter? Don’t the fundamental differences between controlled experimentation and naturalistic observation, on the one hand, and between hunch-based reasoning and statistical analysis, on the other, mean that there is a bright line separating science and psychoanalysis? Yes and no.

It is a commonplace that scientists’ theories must be tailored to their observations. It is perhaps less obvious, but no less true, that scientists’ methods must be tailored to fit what they are observing. There is no point in studying embryos with an atom-smasher, or atoms with a Petri dish. The methods that scientists employ can never merely be those that work in other fields of study, but must be those dictated by the nature of the matter they are trying to study.

Theory, method and observation are related to each other in complex ways. Theories about the nature of a problem sculpt the method with which one approaches it. One’s methods determine at least in part what one will end up observing, and one’s observations then modify one’s theories. When the relationships between method, theory and observation are sound, theory and method will operate in the service of obtaining new observations. Science develops by enlarging its capacity to observe through developing methods that allow scientists to see things they were previously unable to see.

Psychoanalysis will never be an experimental science. But it is an attempt to develop methods of observation that allow us to see things we could not otherwise see. In this sense, it carries out the spirit of experimental science, even if it cannot follow its letter.

But what does it mean exactly to say that psychoanalysis carries out the spirit of science? And if it doesn’t follow the letter of science, what letter does it follow? When we look at it carefully, do we have reason to believe that the psychoanalytic method is any more than unscientific speculation about unknowable quantities? These are some of the questions I will address in this book.

2
Psychoanalysis and Science

If we compare theory formation in psychoanalysis with theory formation in the experimental sciences, we find that in the experimental sciences, theories are established when hypotheses are subjected to the test of controlled experiment.¹ Controlled experimentation is the sine qua non of experimental science, and an hypothesis becomes a well-established theory in the experimental sciences only by being subjected to its rigors.

Once established, theories in the experimental sciences may be used to replace actual experience in future specific instances of the phenomena to which the theories apply. For example, Bernoulli’s Principle, which began as an hypothesis about the relationship between the movement of a fluid and the pressure it exerts on adjacent surfaces, has been so fully verified by controlled experiment that aeronautical engineers now use it to predict very precisely how much lift a certain wing design will produce. Aircraft designers need not, therefore, construct a series of wings and test them by trial and error in order to know how to build a wing with the desired amount of lift. They may instead use Bernoulli’s Principle to calculate the lift that a given design will produce.

Psychoanalysis resembles the experimental sciences in that it forms hypotheses that are tested against evidence on their way to becoming established (or not) as theories. But while theories in the experimental sciences are established by the construction of controlled experiments, psychoanalytic theories are established by the absorption of the uncontrolled experience of the psychoanalytic session.

This fundamental difference in how theories are established reflects differences in the subject matters psychoanalysis and science address. Theories in the experimental sciences may be validated by means of controlled experiment because in experimental science the phenomena being studied are replicable. In other words, these phenomena may be set up in parallel groups, where each group contains large (statistically significant) numbers of more or less identical individuals, and where the members of one group differ from those of the other by only one relevant variable.² The fact of replicability in the physical sciences makes possible the controlled experimentation and statistical analysis that allows theories to be established with a high degree of precision and certainty.

Psychoanalysis studies phenomena that cannot be replicated or controlled in any precise way. This difficulty is not simply due to the complexity of mental phenomena. The problem lies at a more fundamental level: the events that psychoanalysis studies are states of mind, which are not replicable. They are never precisely the same from one moment to the next, and no two individuals can be said to have states of mind that are "the same" enough to permit the kind of controlled experimentation that would win the respect of experimental scientists. Even more significantly, the variables that are relevant to states of mind cannot be controlled and manipulated for experimental purposes.

Because psychoanalytic theories cannot be confirmed by controlled experiment, they cannot be used to replace direct experience in specific cases the way the theories of the experimental sciences, such as Bernoulli’s Principle, can. On the contrary, to the degree that analysts try to emulate engineers by attempting to use psychoanalytic theory in place of direct trial and error experience with their patients, they fall short of analyzing their patients.

Psychoanalysts commonly recognize in the patient’s material an instance of some general theory or piece of knowledge the analyst already has – "this is splitting" (or Oedipal conflict, or denial, or reaction formation). But analysts who fail to move themselves (or be moved by their experience in the analysis) beyond what was already encompassed by their theories before their encounter with the patient are courting analytic sterility.³ Analysts cannot simply assume that the clinical problem at hand represents a specific instance of a general law, and then apply the general law to the specific instance, since the loss of specific, idiosyncratic detail that such generalizing would entail would have a disastrous effect on the realism of the resulting interpretation. On the contrary, analysts can arrive at an effective theory – a good interpretation – only by carefully absorbing as much as they can of the detail that is unique and specific to their clinical experience with one patient.

For this reason, analysts must maintain a state of highly polished ignorance about what the patient presents them with, until their experience of the patient impresses something on them. An aeronautical engineer who tried to design an airplane in this fashion would be a very bad engineer, having to reinvent the Wright Flyer each time; but an analyst who did not proceed in this manner would be a very bad analyst. Psychoanalysts, for practical purposes, must reinvent the wing each time they make an interpretation.

These differences between psychoanalysis and the experimental sciences may be summarized as follows:

1. Experimental science deals with large classes of individuals, that is, individuals who are more or less indistinguishable, or whose differences can be washed out in statistical analysis without destroying what made them interesting to study in the first place.
   Psychoanalysis does not deal with large classes of individuals, but with single individuals whose differences may not be washed out without major loss of significance.
2. Dealing with large classes of individuals permits scientists to produce a body of theory with highly specific predictive value that can, to a considerable degree, eliminate the need for direct and detailed investigation of individual cases.
   Dealing with single individuals does not permit psychoanalysts to make theoretical generalizations of the type that may be substituted for direct experience.
3. Experimental science conducts its investigations by relying on an established body of experimentally derived theoretical knowledge.
   Psychoanalysis does not rely for its investigations on an established body of theoretical knowledge, but investigates unique cases using a technique of creative exploration.
4. Expertise in experimental science is associated with knowledge of a body of theory.
   Expertise in psychoanalysis consists of the capacity to work in ignorance of theory – to see what one is looking at without theoretical preconceptions.

Ignoring the differences between (non-replicable) mental and (replicable) physical phenomena, and the differences in methodology required for the study of each, poses the gravest risk to anyone interested in understanding the mind. In his book Learning from Experience (1962) [4], the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion writes of a patient whose thought processes lacked the qualities of depth, resonance and evocativeness that one associates with the human mind, and seemed to be the product not of a mind, but of a machine. From the data of the patient’s analysis, he draws a picture of the mental "organ" whose impairment resulted in this state of affairs, and reconstructs what might have happened to this patient. This reconstruction is worth recounting in some detail.

Bion begins by taking seriously the common-sense notion that, just as infants need physical care and comfort, they also need love,⁴ from which it follows that, under normal circumstances, an infant must have the capacity to perceive love – a kind of "sense organ" for love – much as it has sense organs for perceiving other vital necessities such as food and warmth.

To perceive the love it needs, the infant must be able to bear the emotional strain of realizing that its well-being and even its survival depends on something as uncontrollable as its mother’s love. Bion considers the extreme case of an infant completely unable to bear this strain. Such an infant might blind itself to these unbearable needs and to the love, solace and understanding that would both elicit and satisfy them.⁵

An infant who destroys its "sense organ" for love in this way grows into an adult like one of Bion's patients, who greedily pursued every form of material comfort in a vain effort to supply himself with the non-material comfort he lacked but could not even recognize. Such an infant eventually conies to live in a perceptual world composed only of material objects, and inevitably becomes like a material object himself, with machine-like thought processes. To Bion, this mental mechanization represents a breakdown in the patient's equipment for thinking about emotional realities that leaves the patient living in a universe populated by emotionless objects that Bion calls "inanimate."

He then moves beyond the immediate clinical problem to reflect on its wider scientific significance: the scientific methods and modes of thought that are appropriate to an understanding of the inanimate world (such as those of physics or chemistry), or to an understanding of the mechanical aspects of biological or social systems (such as those of physiology and behaviorism), yield models that are mechanical and therefore inappropriate for understanding the mind.

When we see a patient such as Bion’s treating mental events as though they were subject to manipulation and control like the stuffof physics and engineering, we say the patient suffers from the type of thought disorder known as concrete thinking. This diagnostic label obscures the fact that the difference between such a patient’s approach to the mind and the scientist’s is only a matter of degree. It is very difficult for anyone entirely to escape concrete thinking when trying to form firm, precise, predictive conclusions about the human mind. Psychoanalysis is, among other things, a battle against this kind of concrete thinking. It brings about psychological development not just by discovering new information, but by bringing about a change in patients’ perspectives or attitudes toward their own mind – a new relationship to their mind. After a successful analysis, patients are more able to treat the events occurring in their mind as mental.

The wish to treat states of mind as though they were inanimate objects – to predict, control and manipulate them, or to get rid of unwanted pieces of them, or to transform their nature at will – is common even among patients without manifest thought d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Psychoanalysis and science
• 3 Psychoanalysis and science: rules and games
• 4 The origins of psychoanalysis in the art of medicine
• 5 Psychoanalytic observation
• 6 Room for doubt
• 7 Psychoanalytic reasoning: finding the context
• 8 Terror and the archaic superego
• 9 Psychoanalysis, the individual and the group
• 10 Psychoanalytic work
• References
• Index