The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof

I

With its title that grabs the reader by the lapels, Austin Ratner has written a bristling porcupine of a book that addresses a host of issues important to the psychoanalytic community. A graduate of The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and an award-winning novelist, Ratner was introduced to the world of psychoanalysis as a toddler at the Hanna Perkins Nursery School in Cleveland and has had a personal analysis, in which a central theme was the death of his father at the age of twenty-nine, eleven days before Austin’s third birthday. The odyssey that began in Ratner’s childhood has been crowned by his recent appointment as editor of The American Psychoanalyst, the public face of our organization. If it cannot be denied that The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof has the defects of its considerable virtues, Ratner is nonetheless to be wholeheartedly commended both for the vigor of his style and for mounting an impassioned defense of psychoanalysis that is deeply rooted in the soil of his lived experience.

Rounded off by a brief introduction and conclusion, the body of Ratner’s book is divided into four parts, the first three of which—“Freud’s Aversion to Proof: A Case Study,” “The Legacy of Freud’s Aversion to Proof,” and “The Postmodern Aversion to Proof”—set forth his diagnosis of the problem, while the fourth, “Solutions to the Problem of Proof Aversion,” outlines his proposed remedy. The longest part, the foundational “case study” of Freud, comprises two logically distinct strands, which it is necessary to consider separately: a presentation of the evidence for Freud’s disregard of scientific norms and an attempt to explain his “proof aversion” psychoanalytically.

By far the most compelling aspect of Ratner’s book is his demonstration of Freud’s indifference to—indeed, disdain for—“the task of demonstrating psychoanalysis and its merits to the public” (p. 22) in the manner of a traditional scientist. As Ratner observes, when Saul Rosenzweig informed Freud about his efforts to test Freud’s theories experimentally, Freud responded in a 1934 letter that he did not “put much value on such confirmation because the abundance of reliable observations on which these propositions rest makes them independent of experimental verification” (p. 32). Rosenzweig later identified the crux of the problem when he commented that Freud “came to regard any experimental approach to the verification of psychoanalytic concepts as harboring an undercurrent of personal ‘resistance’ concealed by respectable scientific intent” (pp. 32–33).

Situating Freud’s blind spot in the context of the history of science, Ratner points out that Galileo, in his seventeenth-century debate with the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Scheiner about the nature of sunspots, did not question his opponent’s motives but simply “set out to destroy Scheiner’s arguments and advance his own” (p. 36). Freud, by contrast, declined to engage in scientific disputes and instead blamed the irrationality of his critics for their alleged refusal to give his ideas a fair hearing. Ratner calls attention to the following passage from “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement”:

I made up my mind not to answer my opponents and, so far as my influence went, to restrain others from polemics. Under the peculiar conditions of the controversy over psycho-analysis it seemed to me very doubtful whether either public or written discussion would avail anything; it was certain which way the majority at congresses and meetings would go, and my faith in the reasonableness and good behaviour of the gentlemen who opposed me was not at any time great [p. 28].

In contrast to “scientific explanation,” in which the proponent of a hypothesis “justifies his or her ideas so that the audience understands and trusts them,” Freud does the opposite by arguing, in effect, “My theory will elicit doubt, but doubt is only resistance, which my theory will explain, and therefore it constitutes evidence of my theory. So I must ask you to check your doubt at the door” (p. 147). By putting the reader in a “heads I win, tails you lose” double bind, such circular reasoning is tantamount to a religious appeal that, in Ratner’s words, “asks for faith at the outset, and advocates faith as an instrument of understanding” (p. 147). Hence, when Freud maintains that “the best way to learn psychoanalysis is to undergo a psychoanalysis,” this strategy for deflecting criticism bears a disconcerting resemblance to the rhetoric of a Scientologist who says, “The best way to understand Scientology is to become a Scientologist,” upon hearing which, Ratner justifiably protests, “I would of course be suspicious” (p. 150).

No less convincing is Ratner’s demonstration that Freud’s “emotional distortion” led him to describe Leopold Löwenfeld as well as two other prominent contemporaries, Adolf von Strümpell and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, “as though they opposed and damaged psychoanalysis when in fact they were his allies” (pp. 14–15). In an 1895 letter to Fliess, Freud decried Löwenfeld’s review of his work on anxiety neurosis as an “attack,” but Ratner points out that this seriously distorts what Löwenfeld had written in the following passage:

The Freudian theory may well be more or less justified in a large number of cases of anxiety states. My own observations also speak to the fact that anomalies in sexual life are of great significance in the genesis of obsessions and phobias. What I must object to is only Freud’s claim of a specificity and uniformity for the sexual etiology in cases of acquired anxiety states [p. 16].

What we have here is almost entirely laudatory, qualified only by Löwenfeld’s demurral concerning the categorical nature of Freud’s championing of the “sexual etiology,” but this was enough to turn Löwenfeld’s judicious assessment into an “attack” in Freud’s mind. Because of his pattern of unwarranted complaints about not having been given a fair hearing, which persisted “over a period of decades and in a wide variety of circumstances,” Ratner concludes that Freud “carried a sense of persecution around inside him” (pp. 67–68).

The most famous example of Freud’s unwillingness to tolerate dissent is his rupture with Jung, the theoretical component of which had to do with Jung’s “belief that Freud had defined libido too narrowly” (p. 102). As Ratner underscores, “Jung’s complaints against a purely sexual definition of libido do not look radical or dangerous today except under a lens of paranoia looking hard for resistances to the sexual candor of psychoanalysis” (p. 102). That Freud exhibited what Breuer diagnosed as a “paranoia scientifica” (p. 70) is further manifested by the fact that he “didn’t even read Jung’s New York lectures,” which had been delivered in 1912 at Fordham University before being published in The Psychoanalytic Review, “until early August 1913, after he’d already broken off personal relations with Jung” (p. 102). Even after having read them, Freud “misrepresent[ed] Jung’s American lectures in the extreme” when he wrote in “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” “Jung is in full retreat from psycho-analysis” (p. 100), despite the fact that his erstwhile heir apparent continued to agree with him in most respects.

II

Although likely to perturb orthodox Freudians, the twin cornerstones of Ratner’s argument—that Freud displayed a disregard of the norms of a responsible scientist and that this state of mind was rooted in emotional factors which repeatedly came to the fore in his vituperation of those who refused to pronounce his shibboleths—are securely established. Where, then, does Ratner go astray? He does so not only in how he explains the origins of Freud’s “proof aversion” but also in the primacy he ascribes to it as a component of Freud’s character. As Ratner makes clear when he gives a section of his “case study” the title “Freud’s Authoritarianism as a Product of Proof Aversion” (p. 92), he views Freud’s proof aversion as the root cause of his problems, and his authoritarianism as an effect of that underlying tendency. He sums up this linchpin of his thesis as follows:

a lacuna runs through [Freud’s] work from end to end: an irrational, emotional interference in his efforts to prove his theories. The interference manifests itself in expressions of pessimism about proof, spurious arguments about proof, ambivalence about proof, and in authoritarian, dogmatic attitudes that conflict with scientific method [p. 123; emphasis added].

The causal arrow, however, goes in the other direction. As Fromm laid bare with unsurpassed cogency in Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959), it is Freud’s authoritarianism that is the defining feature of his character, of which his proof aversion is a byproduct. According to Ratner, “the most satisfactory explanation . . . for this distorted thinking and behavior around proof is that public presentation of charged psychological data caused Freud shame, anxiety, and guilt, which his ego sought to delimit through defense mechanisms” (p. 124). Ratner suggests that Freud’s defensiveness “about sexual knowledge and its public demonstration” appears “to be intimately connected with his own infantile sexual researches and his competition in the realm of knowledge with his unlearned father” (p. 124).

The flaw in this reasoning is that Freud displayed no inhibitions whatever about putting his theories before the public, whether about sexuality or anything else, but rather insisted on fealty to his doctrines and turned almost everyone who could not be pressed into the service of his cause from a friend into an enemy. It is not the emotionally charged nature of his ideas that caused Freud’s “proof aversion,” but his authoritarian character that explains his refusal to engage in genuine debate or dialogue with other minds. By the same token, the perpetuation of this attitude by analysts such as Leo Rangell and Charles Brenner in “the postwar American heyday” (p. 130) had nothing to do with hesitancy about expounding Freud’s doctrines, but was rather due to their falling in line behind Freud’s dismissal (to quote Rosenzweig) of “any experimental approach to the verification of psychoanalytic concepts.” Thus, Brenner could opine with misplaced confidence that psychoanalysts “don’t have to become scientists; they are scientists already” (p. 131), and the work of academic psychologists is “of minor importance” (p. 133) compared to the “research” done by analysts in their consulting rooms.

Compounding his misdiagnosis of the essential problem that requires explanation, Ratner does not go far enough in his attempts to understand Freud’s character psychoanalytically. It is telling that, for this part of his argument, he relies almost entirely on the biographies of Jones (1953–1957) and Peter Gay (1988), both of which enshrine an idealized image of Freud, while bypassing those of revisionists such as Fromm and Louis Breger (2000), who, while being no less committed to psychoanalysis than their orthodox counterparts, present a more complex and compelling view of Freud as a tragically flawed genius. Although Ratner traces Freud’s “proof aversion” back to his “infantile sexual researches and his competition in the realm of knowledge with his unlearned father” (p. 124), he does not go beneath an oedipal level of analysis to examine the conflicts in Freud’s relationship with his mother, to say nothing of the formative influence of the nursemaid(s) who loomed so large in his early childhood. In adopting what is essentially Freud’s own narrative of his life, Ratner not only appears to be unaware of the sea change that has taken place in Freud studies; paradoxically, he also combines his critique of Freud’s “proof aversion” and “paranoia scientifica” with an anachronistic attitude of hero worship.

To be sure, Ratner is capable of castigating Freud in no uncertain terms. In addition to describing Freud as “carrying a sense of persecution around inside him” (p. 68), he charges him with invoking “emergency dictatorial powers” (p. 96) in his battles with colleagues, practicing “an almost McCarthy-like guilt by association” (p. 103), and bequeathing to psychoanalysis “a dogmatic style of thought” (p. 116). But if all these things are true, then why does Ratner not give them more weight in his appraisal of Freud? Why does he not align himself with Frank Sulloway (1979), who, while pointing out that “Freud feared mediocrity and others’ anticipations of his ideas more than he feared error in science” (p. 87), nonetheless acknowledges that his “writings may be said to contain a richness of thought and observations about human behavior that will outlive the particular constructs he championed” (p. 500)? Or, even more radically, why does Ratner not make common cause with John Farrell (1996), who propounds the thesis that “Freud’s method of thinking seems to fall unambiguously within the category that he himself designates as paranoid” (p. 3)?

Ratner, however, will have no truck with a revisionist such as Sulloway, let alone with anyone who, like Farrell, might be labeled a “Freud-basher.” Not surprisingly, the greatest bête noire of the psychoanalytic community, Frederick Crews, receives two lashes in the form of Ratner’s citations of negative reviews of his book by George Prochnik in the New York Times (p. 77) and by Lisa Appignanesi in the New York Review of Books (p. 256). Yet Ratner gives no indication of having taken the trouble to read Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Crews 2017), or asking himself—in a truly scientific spirit—what even ardent defenders of psychoanalysis might have to learn from one of its severest but also most erudite critics.

Ratner, in short, does not appear able to see how devastating his analysis of Freud’s “proof aversion” and “authoritarian, dogmatic attitudes” really is, and clings to an exalted image of his hero that the substance of his book renders untenable. He writes in a revealing passage:

Anyone who reads deeply in Freud’s works, and is not too angry with him to appreciate some of his insights, can see that he derived his ideas from sincere observation and deduction, not from faith. But he did ask others to accept his ideas on faith—specifically, their faith in him [p. 146].

Freud’s sincerity is not in dispute, but Ratner contradicts himself in claiming that a man as averse to the scientific method and as wedded to a priori ideas as Freud derived them primarily from “observation and deduction.” That compliment would be better paid to Pierre Janet, the cautiously empirical “Doctor Pencil” who took meticulous notes on some five thousand patients in the course of his career, than to the swashbuckling conquistador who proclaimed at the conclusion of the Little Hans case, “Strictly speaking, I learnt nothing new from this analysis” (Freud 1909, p. 147). Conversely, like Fromm and Breger, Ratner himself is living proof that to take Freud to task for his defects does not have to mean that one is “angry” at him or unable “to appreciate some of his insights.”

By resorting to such black-and-white thinking, Ratner too readily adopts Freud’s view of things, even though he cautions the reader against doing so. On one hand, he remarks near the outset of his book, “Freud’s disciples have long accepted his account of his relations with his critics at face value. But is it accurate? Is there an element of emotional distortion in it?” (p. 14). On the other hand, Ratner does not blink when Freud accuses Janet of antisemitism. Shortly after quoting Freud’s pronouncement that Janet’s “reproach” of him “for being a citizen of Vienna is only a euphemistic substitute for another reproach which no one would care to put forth openly” (p. 85), Ratner writes: “It would have been much harder for Freud to take a nuanced view of someone like Janet, and of how best to respond to him, when Janet’s anti-Semitic taunts against Viennese sexuality sounded the same notes played by the mob of Freud-haters” (p. 93; emphasis added). To allege that Janet is guilty of “anti-Semitic taunts,” and to couple him with “the mob of Freud-haters,” is to impugn his integrity; and Ratner owes it to his readers to document that this charge is based on something more substantial than the often “emotionally distorted” word of Freud.

Similarly, with respect to the rift between Freud and Breuer, even though Ratner concedes the justice of Breuer’s characterization of Freud as a man afflicted with “paranoia scientifica,” he himself accepts at face value the authorized version of the history of psychoanalysis, according to which “Freud had seized an opportunity for fame and discovery that his mentor Breuer failed to seize himself,” and goes so far as to affirm that “Freud had killed him in the annals of science, where Breuer would forever cling to Freud’s towering name as a footnote” (p. 70). Once again, rather than take for granted this received view of the stature of the two men, it would have behooved Ratner to adopt a more skeptical stance and wonder—as both Sulloway and Henri Ellenberger (1970) have done—whether it might not be possible to reimagine the “annals of science” so that Breuer becomes more than a corpse left by the wayside of the triumphal procession of “Freud’s towering name.”

A final illustration of how Ratner gets carried away by his zeal to defend Freud is furnished by his evisceration of Husserl, on whom Ratner frowns for his influence on a rogue’s gallery of postmodernists. Although both Freud and Husserl studied with Franz Brentano, Ratner would have us believe that Husserl’s “professional anxieties soon afterward diverted him from Freud’s scientific path onto a relativistic philosophical one. He gave up psychology just as he gave up his Judaism by converting to Protestantism” (p. 210). There are three things wrong with these assertions, of which the third is the most alarming. First, Ratner posits that Husserl’s transformation from an empirical psychologist into a phenomenological philosopher was due to “professional anxieties” rather than to intellectual conviction. Second, he takes it for granted that becoming one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century was a misstep that “diverted” Husserl from following “Freud’s scientific path,” which should have been his proper course. Finally, by equating Husserl’s abandonment of psychology with his conversion from Judaism to Protestantism, Ratner not only maligns Husserl’s character—as he does that of Janet—in ad hominem fashion, but he also uses a spurious analogy in an attempt to refute an intellectual position with which he disagrees.

III

Notwithstanding Ratner’s own blind spot with respect to the implications of his analysis of Freud’s “proof aversion” and his reversal of the causal relation between this symptom and the essential problem of Freud’s authoritarian character, the central pillars of his edifice remain unshaken. The ensuing parts of his book display the same commingling of virtues and defects as the “case study” of Freud, although in the “The Postmodern Aversion to Proof” Ratner’s lapses become more pronounced.

On the positive side, Ratner illuminates how a disdain of science permeates the history of psychoanalysis. He begins with Jones, who in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis—published in 1920—followed “Freud’s party line that ‘human nature’ rebels against the ‘disagreeable truths’ of psychoanalysis,” but “when critics ask for proof” of these truths, he “offers counterattacks on critics’ resistance, just as Freud did” (pp. 129–130). Then Ratner turns to the “postwar American heyday,” highlighting the hard line against empirical research taken by Brenner and Rangell, but also calling attention to the reluctance of less doctrinaire contemporaries such as Jacob Arlow and Ralph Greenson to muster more than “a very mild objection” to this stance or to “suggest a more scientific style of education or research” (pp. 134–135) than prevailed in analytic institutes for decades following the Second World War.

No less commendably, Ratner delineates a countervailing tradition of analysts who have bucked what once seemed an irresistible tide of opposition to research and, gradually, helped turn it in the opposite direction. Key figures include Edward Glover in London, who, as early as 1952, warned that “a great deal of what passes as attested theory is little more than speculation, varying widely in plausibility” (p. 268), and called on his colleagues to “settle down to the long and arduous task of defining terms, verifying criteria and developing reliable statistics” (p. 132). Subsequently, Merton Gill, together with his coauthors on a 1968 paper about audio recordings of analytic sessions, lamented that “calls for psychoanalytic research like Glover’s ‘have evoked little response,’” and took issue with Brenner’s view that “every analysis is a piece of research and hence, presumably, every analyst is a research investigator.” Ratner pays tribute to the “brave souls,” including Hartvig Dahl, Lester Luborsky, and Howard Shevrin, who, often with “little institutional support,” have undertaken empirical research studies, as well as others—such as Jonathan Shedler and Drew Westen—whose reviews of the literature have established not only “the abundance of empirical evidence that supports the core of psychoanalytic theory: repression and the dynamic unconscious” (p. 258), but also the long-term benefits of psychoanalytic therapy.

Regrettably, however, Ratner’s polemic against postmodernism shows him at his least attractive. Despite the verve with which it is conducted, it possesses an indiscriminate quality that frequently leads him to treat complex thinkers in a cursory fashion and to resort without sufficient reflection to ad hominem arguments. Just as Ratner takes cheap shots at Janet and Husserl, so too he belittles both Beckett, who “struggled to define himself in Joyce’s wake,” and Borges, who “was so constipated with anxiety in the wake of Kafka . . . that he could hardly bring himself to say a single intelligible word” (p. 212). (The word “wake” is ironic when applied to Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake has proved impenetrable to all but the most intrepid readers.) The sole justification for these affronts is that Beckett and Borges are postmodernists, but they serve only to distract the reader from the case that Ratner is trying to make about the indispensability of a scientific outlook to safeguard the future of psychoanalysis. Even when such a critique is warranted, as in the case of Paul de Man, it would take more than Ratner’s handful of pages based entirely on one secondary source to do justice to this instructive paradigm of the perils of postmodernism.

Ratner seeks to connect this part of his book with the whole by claiming that relational psychoanalysis is infected by postmodernism and, therefore, irredeemably contaminated. According to Ratner, relational psychoanalysts “have recoiled from the very notions of evidence and empiricism, as though they came from another planet,” and they “concur with all those critics . . . who say that psychoanalysis is untestable and untested; but, unlike the critics, they revel in untestability and disdain tests” (p. 142). It is incontestable that some prominent representatives of the relational school—including Lewis Aron, Stephen Mitchell, and Irwin Hoffman—are perspectivists rather than positivists. But Ratner overlooks many other powerful currents in the broad river of relational psychoanalysis—from Ferenczi’s groundbreaking emphasis on the reality of traumatic experience and Bowlby’s monumental attachment theory to Louis Sander’s research on child development and Beatrice Beebe’s microanalysis of videotaped infant-caregiver interactions—when he asserts categorically that relational theory “justifies itself with radical postmodernist skepticism” and that its attempts “to rid psychoanalysis of authoritarianism” have been vitiated by its casting aside “of rationality and scientific progress” (p. 161).

Ratner arraigns relational psychoanalysis at some length, but mentions Kohut only twice in passing. First, in speaking of theories of truth, he disparages “the shift from correspondence to coherence—or incoherence, depending on your taste for writers like Lacan and Ricoeur,” that “seems to have coincided with the outbreak of postmodernism in the humanities in general after 1968 and to have appealed especially to analysts in Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology tradition” (p. 194). Shortly thereafter, he claims that “Kohut’s rhetoric echoes Sartre quite clearly when he declares he’s moving on from Freud’s psychic determinism” (p. 195) to espouse a belief in free will. Ratner again relies for ballast on a single secondary source, but quotes not so much as a sentence from Kohut, let alone from Sartre, to lend credence to his claims. He entirely misses the mark in coupling Kohut with Lacan as conduits by which postmodernism has entered psychoanalysis. Unlike Lacan, for whom the notion of a “split subject” was axiomatic, Kohut, whose therapeutic aim was “restoration of the self” (1977), was no postmodernist.

Nor was Paul Ricoeur a Lacanian. Yet Ratner contends that Ricoeur is guilty of “a tortuous attempt to create epistemic criteria within a closed linguistic system that denies any correspondence with reality” (p. 190). Ratner mocks the distinguished French philosopher for being “full of grandiose witchcraft” and maintains condescendingly that “the only sense in Ricoeur is the bleating of a child crying out, I am immortal” (p. 198). In fact, Ricoeur takes issue with the extreme relativistic position that Ratner ascribes to him. He writes in “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings” (1977):

I do not think it would be correct to give in to this epistemological defeatism, for we would thereby turn psychoanalytic statements into the rhetoric of persuasion under the pretext that it is the account’s acceptability to the patient that is therapeutically effective. . . . This is why we must not give up our efforts to link a truth claim with the narrativity criterion, even if this claim is validated on a basis other than that of narrativity itself [p. 862].

Finally, with respect to Lacan, Ratner skewers him for writing prose that “could clog a kitchen disposal” (p. 187), and quotes the denigration of the reality principle in his essay on the mirror stage as “the expression of a scientific prejudice most hostile to the dialectic of knowledge” (p. 201). It is thus legitimate for Ratner to criticize Lacan because he regards science not as “the ideal of objectivity that we strive towards in order to discover defensive prejudice,” but rather as “itself a form of prejudice against the idle pleasures of narcissistic philosophy” (p. 201). But even where Ratner is on the right track, he loses his footing. To assert that Lacan “reconceived of psychoanalysis as a branch of literary deconstructionism” (p. 187) ignores not only that Derrida clashed with Lacan over Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” but also that Lacan presented his paper on the mirror stage (1949) at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad, when Derrida was six years old. Since Lacan was a generation older than Derrida, it is difficult to see how he could have fashioned his version of psychoanalysis as a “branch of deconstruction,” and it is again a sign of laxity that the only two texts of Lacan’s cited by Ratner are taken not from the Écrits, but from an anthology of writings on literary theory.

Ratner invokes Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” (1973) in his dismissals of Borges and Beckett, as he does also in claiming that “Freud helped to create Husserl, Derrida, and Lacan—not by providing the postmodernists with genuine ideological support, but merely by overwhelming their ambition with his own daunting achievements” (pp. 214–215). But Husserl was Freud’s contemporary—not his follower—and Husserl and Derrida were philosophers, not psychoanalysts. So dazzled is Ratner by Freud’s “daunting achievements” that he seems to exempt Freud (as well as Joyce and Kafka) from having had to shoulder the burden of the past. Ratner does so notwithstanding the anxiety of influence evident in Freud’s protests at two meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908 that the “degree of introspection” reached by Nietzsche “had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely to be again,” but also that he “does not know” the latter’s work “because his occasional attempts at reading it were smothered by an excess of interest” (Nunberg and Federn 1962–1975, 2:31, 1:139). For someone who professes to be dedicated to science and reason, Ratner displays an inordinate penchant for speculation. In one paragraph alone, on page 243, he employs the words “perhaps” and “maybe” eight times, which makes Ratner’s plea on behalf of empiricism in psychoanalysis appear less like a soundly reasoned argument than a precarious house of cards.

IV

Although it may not lead us all the way to the palace of wisdom, the road of excess traveled by Ratner still pays handsome dividends to psychoanalytic readers. Who can fail to admire an independent scholar who, in 2012, singlehandedly waged a battle “to edit the lead paragraph of Freud’s Wikipedia page,” even though he knew that every morning he “would face a torrent of irrational hostility” from an opponent? Ratner gained at least a partial victory when the Wikipedia arbitrator ruled that Freud’s page should acknowledge that his work “remains influential in psychology and psychiatry” and upheld the inclusion of Auden’s eulogy of Freud for having become a veritable “climate of opinion” (p. 255) for everyone in the modern world. It is an intrepid effort such as this, as well as Ratner’s service on APsA’s Task Force for Advocacy, Public Information, and Branding and his membership on the Committee on Public Information, that make him a perfect fit for the editorship of TAP.

In setting forth his indictment of “hardcore postmodernists,” Ratner states that he is “more than willing to continue discussions with them,” although he recognizes that “it is difficult to argue with anyone” who adheres to “the conviction that rationality is a cultural construct” (p. 193). Ratner’s belief in the importance not only of dialogue but also of debate is exemplary, and the timeliness of his book is borne out by the fact that several of his recommendations have already been implemented by APsA. In addition to launching a Wikipedia Project to create more trustworthy gateways to all things psychoanalytic on this information highway, APsA has established a College of Research Fellows, with both Senior and Junior Fellows, the latter of whom receive mentoring, in keeping with Ratner’s admonition that “the only way analysts can make psychological research relevant to their practices is by participating in research” (p. 257). And since Beatrice Beebe has for decades been recording interactions between infants and their mothers, Ratner’s proposal that someone should undertake a “systematic video documentation of children at play specifically in order to corroborate Freudian observations” (p. 264) would be a natural extension of this project.

But while I endorse the spirit of Ratner’s exhortations, it would have been more judicious of him to have said “test” rather than “corroborate Freud’s hypotheses,” since it is unscientific to assume that Freud’s pronouncements about anything are correct. Ratner repeatedly takes it for granted that research should “validate basic psychoanalytic theories and practices” (p. 235; emphasis added) and “appeal to evidence—not in order to question or change the theory, but in order to prove it” (p. 259; emphasis added). If such is indeed the outcome, then so much the better; but all theories are subject to change as new evidence comes to light, and it is integral to the scientific method not to claim to know in advance what the result of a given experiment may be.

Discussing Freud’s relationships with Smith Ely Jelliffe and William Alanson White, cofounders of The Psychoanalytic Review, Ratner comments that he “displayed an even more irrational sort of McCarthyism” (p. 104) than he had displayed toward Stekel and Wittels. Freud’s ire was aroused because Jelliffe had invited Jung to lecture at Fordham in 1912, where he made public his disagreement with Freud’s sexual theory of the libido, and the two Americans aggravated their offense in Freud’s eyes by serializing Jung’s lectures in the inaugural issues of their journal. As Ratner further observes, “Freud accused White and Jelliffe—both of whom were famously altruistic physicians—of founding The Psychoanalytic Review for the ‘unseemly’ motive of profit” (p. 105). This hard-hitting analysis shows how Freud’s authoritarianism led him to construe any display of independence on the part of his associates as an act of disobedience. Unfortunately, Ratner then tries to give the story a happy ending that masks the underlying problem: “But Jelliffe persisted in courting Freud’s favor and, to both Freud and Jelliffe’s credit, they struck up an epistolary friendship that lasted the rest of Freud’s days” (p. 106). The rub lies in the fact that this reconciliation depended on Jelliffe’s “courting Freud’s favor”—that is, abjuring his former associations with Jung and Stekel and pledging his loyalty where it properly belonged—and thus did not allow Jelliffe to extricate himself from the vise of Freud’s double bind. On the contrary, it had as its precondition the subservience that Jelliffe made explicit when he wrote in his final letter to Freud that he and White had learned to accept Freud’s chastisement in “the spirit of the wrongly accused little boy—‘We’ll show papa we were not as bad as he thought’” (Burnham 1983, p. 281).

In the same way that Ratner’s critique of Freud would be enhanced were he to face its implications more squarely, so too his understanding of psychoanalysis is not so much wrong as it is incomplete. If we follow Freud’s tripartite division of psychoanalysis into a theory of mind, a method of investigation, and a form of treatment (1923), Ratner is on firm ground in his conviction that, as a theory of mind, its hypotheses must meet the burden of proof that is the norm in science. It should likewise be possible, with appropriate safeguards, to use written transcripts, audio recordings, and videotapes of analytic sessions to study the dynamics of therapist-patient interactions. But where Ratner falls short is in his perfunctory references to hermeneutics, which do not take into account that, both as an encounter between the unique subjectivities of two human beings in the clinical setting and as a method of investigation into every facet of culture, the hermeneutic dimension of psychoanalysis is ineluctable.

In the final chapter of my book Reading Psychoanalysis (Rudnytsky 2002), “Psychoanalysis and the Dream of Consilience,” I have set forth an extended argument indebted to the late Edward O. Wilson that the unique power and beauty of psychoanalysis stem from its being at once a natural and a human science. This distinction between two realms of human experience was formulated in the nineteenth century by the hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, and it has as its concomitant a contrast between two forms of knowing—understanding (of meanings) and explanation (of causes). The ramifications of this worldview are far-reaching, but its basic principles are not difficult to grasp. As Bowlby (1988) has distilled the matter, there are “two very different aspects of our discipline—the art of psychoanalytic therapy and the science of psychoanalytic psychology.” Each has its “distinctive value,” but they are divided by a “gulf” with respect to both “the contrasting criteria by which each should be judged and the very different mental outlook that each demands” (p. 39). The contrasting yet complementary relation between “psychoanalytic psychology” as a “science” and “psychoanalytic therapy” as an “art,” Bowlby elaborates, corresponds to that between “natural sciences” and the “historical sciences”—which can also be called the “human sciences”—inasmuch as the former are “concerned to formulate general laws in terms of probabilities,” whereas the latter seek “to understand singular specific events in as much detail as possible” (p. 75). And in the “human sciences,” Bowlby adds, “the individual example is the very essence of the case.”

I am sure Ratner would agree that inasmuch as psychoanalysis is a theory of mind, it should be incumbent on analysts to determine which of their beliefs about the mind—and human nature—are supported by the criteria of natural science, and should therefore be preserved, and which ones are not, and should by the same token be discarded. But what I think would surprise him is that it is the spectrum of relationally oriented theories—including attachment theory, British Independent object relations theory, and self psychology—that have been shown to hold up well, whereas Freud’s closed-system drive theory, Klein’s gothic notions that infants are innately sadistic beings whose “earliest reality is wholly phantastic” (1930, p. 221), and Lacan’s equally farfetched claim that the supposed existence of a mirror stage means that the ego of a child as old as a year and a half is situated “before its social determination, in a fictional direction” (1949, p. 2) do not. It is a crucial point that this winnowing process cannot take place within the clinical setting since analysts of any persuasion can convince themselves that their preconceptions are corroborated by their experiences with patients. This is why Brenner was wrong to believe that analysts “don’t have to become scientists; they are scientists already.” On the contrary, we must rely on extraclinical data to aid us in this indispensable task.

But although Bowlby (1988) was quite right when he appended to Kurt Lewin’s maxim, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” the corollary that there is “nothing so handicapping as a poor one” (p. 37), it is not enough to have a sound theory, nor does having an unsound theory necessarily preclude one’s being an effective clinician. There is copious evidence that the most important factor in treatment outcomes is not the analyst’s theoretical orientation but the quality of the relationship formed with the patient. It is enough to say that analysts with a good theory are more likely than others to possess the intangible qualities of tact, empathy, and intuition that will allow them to remain attuned to the patient. As a professor of literature, I believe that this means calling on skills that have far more in common with being able to do a close reading of literary texts than they do with statistics—invaluable though a knowledge of statistics may be if one wants “to formulate general laws in terms of probabilities”—in order to respond sensitively to both the verbal and the nonverbal interactions taking place in an analytic session.

In short, as a theory of mind psychoanalysis is a natural science, but as both a clinical practice and a method of critical inquiry it is a historical science; and it is a category error to suppose that interpretations can ever be demonstrated with mathematical certainty. As Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics:

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs ¹ [1094b; McKeon 1941, p. 936].

If, in addition to inducing Austin Ratner to rethink his position on hermeneutics, I were able to persuade him that his anatomy of Freud’s aversion to proof is more incriminating than he has allowed in his book, I would be prepared to give his courageous and spirited defense of psychoanalysis not just a qualified two—but three wholehearted—cheers.