Abstract
The paper shows how Karl Popper’s critique of ‘historicism’ is permeated by psychoanalytic discourse regardless of his critique that psychoanalysis is one of the exemplars of pseudoscience. Early on, when he was formulating his philosophy of science, Popper had an apparently stringent criterion, viz. falsifiablity, and painstaking analysis. The central argument of this paper is that despite his representation of psychoanalysis as the principal illustration of the category he dubs as ‘pseudoscience’, Popper’s analysis has been infused with psychoanalysis when it comes to his social and political philosophy. Besides, not only was his interpretation of the proponents of ‘historicism’ and the ‘closed’ society mediated by the very concepts of a field which he indicted as pseudoscientific but also he frequently slipped into vacuous and unverifiable accusations forgetting the jurisdiction he formerly accorded to empirical adequacy and logical consistency when examining and assessing theories.
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Notes
In his Poverty of Historicism, Popper also speaks of the testable nature of some social science theories and the possibility of experimenting in society.
In fact, Michel ter Hark and John Wettersten have gone further and provided us with a far more detailed account of how Popper was related to psychology. ter Hark (1993, 2004) and Wettersten (2005, 2007) point out that Popper has heavily drawn on Otto Selz’s cognitive psychology when developing his philosophy of science. Of additional interest for us here might be ter Hark’s (1993: 588) fine distinction between two versions of psychologism he said he found in Popper’s unpublished dissertation. The first strand of psychologism conjoins logic and association psychology, which Popper right away rejects, whereas the second strand (which, according to ter Hark, Popper approved of at the initial stage of the development of his philosophy of science) introduces ‘parallelism between scientific reasoning and cognitive psychology’. A critical point for the purpose at hand here is Popper’s endeavor to distance himself from psychological explanations. ter Hark (1993: 585) himself decidedly notes, “almost the whole burden of Popper’s epistemology is to get rid of any appeal to matters psychological.”
Some people might doubt whether this statement of Freud’s refers to Popper. One of the contentions I had encountered when I presented the paper at Kyoto University, Department of Philosophy, was ‘what if Freud was not referring to Popper’. In fact, many psychoanalysts (including Grant and Harari 2005) do not doubt that Freud was actually referring to Popper. However, whether this might not be the case doesn’t affect my major line of argument here.
Born in 1902, for Popper while the first half of the 1920s were years of apprenticeship (working under one cabinetmaker in Vienna), the second half was devoted to doing his PhD at a university (Popper 1982).
While writing the last section of this paper, I have come across a footnote by Grünbaum where he acknowledges Rosemarie Sand for mentioning to him the psychoanalytic hypotheses underlying some of Popper’s works: ‘Most puzzlingly, as Rosemarie Sand has pointed out to me, Popper actually invokes Freudian hypotheses in all but name with abandon to offer purported explanations, even though he not only discounts their empirical support but disparages them as empirically empty (unfalsifiable)’ [Grünbaum (1980), n. 11, p. 384]. In his illuminating and comprehensive analysis of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Wettersten (2007, p. 186) has also pointed out that ‘his [Popper’s] explanation of the attraction of the closed society’ is a function of ‘a social-psychological hypothesis’. However, it goes without saying that Wettersten is by no means alluding to the existence of Freudian overtones in Popper’s analysis. According to Wettersten’s account, Popper was convinced as early as the late 1920s that ‘the psychology of the Würzburg school as scientific from that of Freud and Adler’ (Wettersten 2007, p. 194). The Dutch psychologist and philosopher ter Hark (1993, 2004) made a similar claim but he emphatically put that Popper was Selzian and has drawn from the cognitive psychology of the ‘Würzburger Schule’ as opposed to ‘association psychology’. But, all the same, ter Hark does not also detect the psychoanalytic discourse in Popper.
Some authors had accused Popper for using the notion of historicism vaguely. A useful reference is Passmore’s (1975) discussion of the various nuances of the term within Popper’s manuscripts.
My concern here is not whether psychoanalysis and historicism are actually examples of pseudoscience. One of the central aims of this paper is therefore to render how enigmatic Popper’s position is, and how his analysis fails to meet the standard he himself has set.
One of the reviewers of this article noted that since concepts such as ‘hysteria,’ ‘obsession,’ ‘narcissistic’ etc. have remained in use in other branches of psychology—‘empirical psychology’ was specifically mentioned—, this would cast doubt on my argument that Popper’s critique of psychoanalysis was shaped by the psychoanalytic discourse. Obviously, as authorities in the area show (for example, see Micale 1989, 1993 on the historiography of hysteria), a few of these key concepts have been in use both before and after the heydays of Freudian psychoanalysis. This is not the point of my contention here. As it is substantiated in my continuing attempt to create parallels between Popper’s understanding and that of Freud’s (see for e.g. footnote no. 11 and several other parallels inside the main text), I am arguing that Popper’s depiction of historicists as hysteric, narcissistic, or maladjusted draws on psychoanalytic portrayal of these attributes.
See also what Freud would say in relation to the satisfaction people could draw from the achievements of the ideals of their culture: ‘The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride in what has already been successfully achieved. To make this satisfaction complete calls for a comparison with other cultures which have aimed at different achievements and have developed different ideals. On the strength of these differences every culture claims the right to look down on the rest. In this way cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between different cultural units, as can be seen most clearly in the case of nations.’ (Freud 1961a, p. 13). He adds: ‘The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture from within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit.’ (ibid.).
Freud himself has talked of ‘inner resistance’ recurrently. In his lecture titled as “‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis,” at a point where he clarifies the treatment of resistance, Freud (1957a) writes: ‘It is a long superseded idea, one derived from superficial appearances, that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it. The task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances.’ (quoted in Habermas 1972, p. 229; emphasis in original).
In par with this is Freud’s description of conflict in dreams. Of the manifest and latent in dreams, he wrote: ‘There must be a force here which is seeking to repress something and another which is striving to prevent its expression. What comes about in consequence as a manifest dream may combine all decisions into which this struggle between two trends has been condensed. At one point one of these forces may have succeeded in putting through what it wanted to say, while at another point it is the opposing agency which has managed to blot out the intended communication completely or to replace it by something that reveals not a trace of it.’ (quoted in Habermas 1972, pp. 222–223)
Popper himself speaks of this in similar language in his Objective Knowledge, which was first published in 1972 (see next footnote).
In his book Objective Knowledge, Popper (preferring the expression ‘situational analysis’ to ‘situational logic’) reiterates: ‘By a situational analysis I mean a certain kind of tentative or conjectural explanation of some human action which appeals to the situation in which the agent finds himself. It may be a historical explanation: we may perhaps wish to explain how and why a certain structure of ideas was created. Admittedly, no creative action can ever be fully explained. Nevertheless, we can try, conjecturally, to give an idealized reconstruction of the problem situation in which the agent found himself, and to what extent make the action “understandable” (or “rationally understandable”), that is to say, adequate to his situation as he saw it. This method of situational analysis may be described as an application of the rationality principle.’ (1979, p. 179).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bekele Gutema, Dagnachew Assefa, and Daniel Smith for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented to a graduate seminar of Department of Philosophy, Kyoto University, and I am therefore grateful for the comments made by students and faculty. I am also very grateful to the editors of the journal and the anonymous reviewers for their highly useful comments. Much of the improvements on the paper were done while I was on a research fellowship of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. I am especially grateful for my host Prof. Masayoshi Shigeta of Kyoto University for his hospitality.
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Kenaw, S. Psychoanalyzing Historicists?: The Enigmatic Popper. J Gen Philos Sci 41, 315–332 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-010-9129-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-010-9129-6