Critical Notice: Freud, Philosophical and Empirical Issues

✍ Scribed by Cioffi, Frank

• Book ID: 111656768
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 868 KB
• Volume: 72
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0031-8191
• DOI: 10.1017/s0031819100057107

✦ Synopsis

Those who are interested in Freud and psychoanalysis will be familiar with questions such as ‘Is Freudian psychology pseudo-scientific?’ ‘Is Freudian psychology falsifiable?’ ’Is unfalsifiability an adequate criterion of pseudo-science?’, and they might naturally suppose that it is these questions of which Erwin has attempted a ‘final accounting’. Surprisingly, these questions hardly feature in Erwin's book. Though at the outset Peter Medawar's notorious judgment that psychoanalysis is ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century’ is cited, Erwin does not seem to think it is part of his final accounting to say either whether he thinks it justified or, if not, why someone of Medawar's distinction should nevertheless have thought so.