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stray wrote: As I'm trying to indicate in other posts in this thread, I'm pretty much open to any interpretations and analysis methodologies, especially now it seems. As much as I love and respect Feynmann I'm not the kind to say as he did "The social sciences are not actually science". I read way too much philosophy and cultural theory to knee jerk like that.
Arguably this is highly self-indulgent of me (so apologies in advance), but this point of yours calls to mind the introductory chapter of my thesis. If I may be so bold, I'll reproduce it here without further comment.
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Everywhere I go, I find that a poet has been there before me.
-- Sigmund Freud
When Sigmund Freud began developing the theory and methodology of psychoanalysis, he was attempting to create a science of the mind. And for much of his life he appeared to maintain that the nature of his work was essentially "scientific", that he was involved in a process which would ultimately do for the human mind what physiology and medicine had done for the body. It was a noble goal, but it was a process he didn't complete successfully. Not due to any fault in his attempts, but because the goal was never truly within his reach.
As has been argued by many critics of Freud -- most notably perhaps, the philosopher Karl Popper -- the claims and theories of psychoanalysis, particularly with regard to the unconscious, can be neither falsified nor verified in anything like a traditional "scientific" sense. Our mental world belongs to what Descartes termed the realm of privileged access; it cannot be summoned forth into a laboratory for measurement and classification, and we must content ourselves with studying the effects of this mental world on the physical one -- via the reports and behaviour of individuals -- in order to know anything at all about it.
So even those of us who are most strident in our support of Freud's legacy must accept that psychoanalysis is not a science in the same sense that physics, chemistry or even biology is a science. It does not deal in verifiable or falsifiable facts, and there are critics of the field who see this as a fatal flaw. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that while psychoanalysis may not deal in scientific fact, it unquestionably deals in truth. And while the methodology of psychoanalysis may not have culminated in a scientific discipline, it brought the power and rigour of the scientific method to bear on the mind, which in turn lifted the psyche out of the realm of the quasi-mystical and into the mainstream of human knowledge.
Indeed it's clear that Freud himself understood this to a large extent. As early as 1917, in the preface to his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud writes that "It was not possible in my presentation to preserve the unruffled calm of a scientific treatise". And while we should be wary of reading too much into that single, throwaway line, Freud was very specific in a 1934 interview conducted by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Papini…
Everybody thinks that I stand by the scientific character of my work and that my principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. This is a terrible error that has prevailed for years and that I have been unable to set right. I am a scientist by necessity, and not by vocation. I am really by nature an artist... And of this there lies an irrefutable proof: which is that in all countries into which psychoanalysis has penetrated it has been better understood and applied by writers and artists than by doctors. My books, in fact, more resemble works of imagination than treatises on pathology... I have been able to win my destiny in an indirect way, and have attained my dream: to remain a man of letters, though still in appearance a doctor.
So while the theories presented by Freud, and those who followed him, cannot be conveniently moulded into the shape of scientific fact; the truths contained within them are no less valid -- no less vital -- both to us as individuals and to society as a whole. So much so, that we should view with suspicion, and no little concern, any attempt to reject or discredit psychoanalysis merely because it fails to conform to a structure originally built to contain the physical sciences. As Bateson observes…
We may joke about the way misplaced concreteness abounds in every word of psychoanalytic writing -- but in spite of (this), psychoanalysis remains as the outstanding contribution, almost the only contribution to our understanding of the family -- a monument to the importance and value of loose thinking.
And that observation doesn't even tell a fraction of the story. The "concreteness" of neurobiology is hardly in dispute. So when we are told, for instance, that memories are acquired through the formation and alteration of protein clusters in the parahippocampal gyrus, we have no reason to doubt it. Furthermore, this explanation of memory has many practical applications and is surely of immense use in a range of situations. What it fails to do, however, is explain anything at all about "the problem of having a mind" to lift a phrase from Wilfred Bion; about the experience of "being human". For this we must turn to psychoanalysis, and it is for this that we owe such a debt of gratitude to Freud and his "misplaced concreteness".
This point needs to be made at the outset -- even at the risk of labouring it -- because, as we shall see, when we apply the tools of psychoanalysis to the collective psyche of contemporary culture we are led to a troubling conclusion; a conclusion it would be foolhardy, even dangerous, to dismiss or ignore based upon an ideological objection.
Before we commence that analysis, however, it is worth taking a brief look at the basic elements of Freud's topography and highlighting the ways in which it can be applied to groups as well as individuals. For psychoanalysis to have any relevance at all, we must obviously first locate an identifiable psyche, and the reality of a 'collective mind' with its own internal structure and drives is by no means a given.
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