Why Thematic Kinships Between Events Do Not Attest Their Causal Linkage

Abstract

There are strongly diverging diagnoses of the defects of psychoanalytic theory. In a paper on schizophrenia, the German philosopher and professional psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1974, p. 91) wrote: “In Freud’s work we are dealing in fact with [a] psychology of meaning, not causal explanation as Freud himself thinks”. The father of psychoanalysis, we learn, fell into a “confusion of meaning connections with causal connections”. After Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur has elaborated the patronizing claim that Freud basically misunderstood what he himself had wrought. As Ricoeur tells us in his book Freud and Philosophy (1970, p. 359), psychoanalytic theory is a hermeneutic enterprise, as opposed to a natural science: “psychoanalysis is an exegetical science dealing with the relationships of meaning between symptoms and repressed instinctual mentation”.

The original version of this paper was delivered at the Workshop on SCIENTIFIC FAILURE, held on April 23–14, 1988 at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. The present revised text was delivered at the Florence Center for the History & Philosophy of Science in June, 1988.