Naturalistic studies of psychoanalytic treatments: some epistemological and methodological remarks

Psychoanalysis Today-A Pseudoscience? A Critique of the Arbitrary Nature of Psychoanalytic Theories and Practice

The article centers on psychoanalysts' indifferent attitude to the mutually exclusivity of theoretical conceptualizations and the ensuing technical rules for treatment. In the author's view this indifference is due to psychoanalysts being business people for whom the exchange value of their service is essentially of greater interest than its utility value, which latter is only of interest as a means of realizing the former. The author argues that, as a consequence of the disparate coexisting conceptualizations being treated as equally valid, psychoanalysis becomes a science without truth, that is, a pseudoscience, and demonstrates that all attempts to appropriate the epithet ornans "scientific" to psychoanalysis by linking its concepts to findings in areas beyond its conceptual field have failed. Finally, he offers a proposal of how the situation might be altered.

Repression and substitutive formation: the relationship between Freud's concepts reconsidered

This paper examines Freud's concept of repression and the relationship between repression and substitutive formation as it presents itself in Freud's writings. The author shows that Freud gives at least four different meanings to the term "repression": Freud uses it interchangeably with defense, as a consciously intended forgetting, as a specific unconscious mechanism of defense, and to describe the consequence of defense mechanisms leading to substitutive formations. The inconsistencies in this relationship are discussed and clarified, and Freud's economic and linguistic attempts at founding repression are subjected to critique; the need of a primal repression as a necessary condition for repression proper is pointed out. In developing Freud's linguistic foundation of repression further, the author presents defense as a semantic displacement. Ideas are excluded from the realm of the concepts that belong to them historically. These presentations become unconscious, that is, repressed, in that they can no longer be identified as "cases" of these conceptual internal contents. At the same time they are displaced into the extensions of concepts whose internal contents do not belong to them originally. It is by virtue of the internal contents of these concepts that the displaced elements as substitutive formations once again attain consciousness, albeit a false one. The author suggests dismissing repression as a specific defense mechanism of its own; to reversing Freud's thesis that repression, as a rule, creates a substitutive formation into its opposite; and recognizing that the mechanisms used to build substitutes, as a rule, create repression.

Psychoanalysis--on its way down a dead-end street? A concerned commentary

The author discusses the problems when psychoanalysis not only neglects socio-critical issues, diversifies its concepts and sets about to define their common ground with the help of brain research findings and/or of infant observation, but also ignores the implications of attempts to legitimate its scientific status by verifying the outcome of its treatments via nomological and/or qualitative study designs. It is argued that if we reduce psychoanalysis to a mere psychotherapeutic measure we displace the factors essential to neurotic disorders into the blind spot of our field of vision, thus rendering psychoanalysis to be a pseudoscience based on appearances alone. Conceptual clarity, it is argued, cannot be gained from the findings of infant observation or those of brain research. Neither can psychoanalytic treatments be investigated in these manners as long as our current understanding of technical concepts remains highly contradictory. In the author's view present-day psychoanalysis gambles Freud's inheritance away and with it, probably, its own future.