Hebb's conception of instinctive behavior permits the conclusion that it is just not human nature to be instinctive: while the ant brain is built for instinctive behavior, the human brain is built for intelligent behavior. Since drives cannot be instincts, even when a human driver becomes driven, human motives are not instincts either. This understanding allows us to dismiss the determinism of the old instinctivism found in Freud's bio-psychological unconscious, and of the new instinctivism, exemplified by Wilson's sociobiology. The latter (...) entails an explanatory shift from instincts to genes, in which the deterministic character of instincts is carried over to genes. Since genes are not instincts this is a mistake. (shrink)

The guiding idea of Patricia Kitcher's Freud's Dream is that the use of interdisciplinary methodology accounts at the same time for the most central features of Freud's theory of the mind and for its most serious shortcomings. Kitcher proposes to provide an account of Freud's theory that illuminates its interdisciplinary underpinnings. While she indisputably succeeds in providing a subtle and rich reconstruction of Freud's work, her attempt to show up the limitations of interdisciplinary studies does not work. The value of (...) her account is attributable not to the idea that Freud's was a flawed interdisciplinary endeavour but to a contextually and historically sensitive approach that makes explicit and elucidates the norms of explanation at work in his method of theory construction and that takes into account the multifaceted nature of his scientific practice. (shrink)

The psychiatric interview plays a critical role in clinical assessment and therapy. Problems with assessment reliability and validity that were apparent in nosological and diagnostic discrepancies plagued the field of psychiatry historically. Technical approaches including structured interviews were developed to address these problems. Although these approaches decreased diagnostic variance, they focused narrowly on eliciting signs and symptoms conforming to previously agreed diagnostic categories, necessarily restricting the range and richness of experiences and narratives that are elicited. This restriction inhibits the utility (...) of assessment in furthering the interpersonal rapport and exploration that is essential to the task of therapy. The author reviews critiques of technical approaches to psychiatric assessment and highlights critical, often unexamined, epistemological assumptions and questions. In light of these critiques, he proposes a phenomenological approach to psychiatric assessment focused on narratives that situate particular experiences in the broader life context. In this approach the assessor functions as a participant observer, relying on the same empathic skills that inform effective therapy. It is argued that without over turning the advances in assessment reliability gained through technical approaches to the psychiatric interview, a phenomenological approach can illuminate, enrich, and broaden psychiatric assessment, increasing its effectiveness in psychopathological understanding and in therapy. (shrink)

Abstract There have been increasingly popular claims that hermeneutics provides an epistemology that is appropriate and sufficient for psychotherapy. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and explain those claims. Hermeneutics proves to provide terms that legitimize aspects of clinical expertise that have been most ignored within the traditional empiricist epistemology; namely, hermeneutics articulates and provides standards for therapeutic interpretations about clients? idiosyncratic intentions and also for using clinical theories that defy empirical test. Nonetheless, hermeneutics also proves to be (...) limited in its account of clinical knowledge. That is, clinicians who advocate hermeneutics have ruled out any legitimate basis on which clinical expertise can be influenced by knowledge about non?intentional constraints on psychological life. Yet, therapists must use such knowledge, especially that which concerns the non?intentional constraints imposed by human development. Thus, to realize its potential, hermeneutics should be embedded within a more comprehensive epistemology that includes compatible standards for knowledge about development. Finally, this paper concludes by proposing an outline for such an inclusive approach to clinical knowledge. (shrink)

Intersubjectivity, the cooperation of two or more minds, is basic to human behavior, yet eludes the grasp of psychiatry. This paper traces the dilemma to the “problem of other minds” assumed with the epistemologies of modern science. It presents the solution of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, known for his treatment of other minds in terms of “human agreement in language.”Unlike recent studies of “Wittgenstein's psychology,” this one reviews the Philosophical Investigations' “private language argument,” the crux of his mature views on mind. (...) It reads that argument as recording his shift from the modern egocentric paradigm of mind to an intersubjective one.The paper contrasts the merits of Wittgenstein's reduction of subject and object to grammar with the problems of Freud's metapsychological reduction. It shows how Wittgenstein's intersubjective method avoids the excesses of behaviorism and phenomenology, offering a specifically human way to adapt mechanistic and interpretive means to the communicative ends of psychiatry. (shrink)

This book critically examines Freud's own detailed arguments for his major explanatory and therapeutic principles, the current neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis, and the hermeneuticists' reconstruction of Freud's theory and therapy as an alternative to what they claim was a “scientistic” misconstrual of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The clinical case for Freud's cornerstone theory of repression – the claim that psychic conflict plays a causal role in producing neuroses, dreams, and bungled actions – turns out to be ill-founded for two main reasons: (...) Even if clinical data were valid, the method of free association has failed to support the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious motivation; Clinical data tend in any case to be artifacts of the analyst's self-fulfilling expectations, thus losing much of their evidential value. The hypothesis that psychoanalytic treatment is in reality a placebo poses a serious challenge to the assumption that insight is a key causal factor when therapy is successful. This challenge has yet to be met by psychoanalysts. Similar conclusions undermine the neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis. The most influential hermeneuticists, on the other hand, are shown to have imposed an alien philosophy on psychoanalysis, partly through their reliance on gross misconceptions of the natural sciences. Karl Popper's criticism of the Freudian corpus as empirically untestable has misjudged its evidential weaknesses, which are more subtle. If there exists empirical evidence for the principal psychoanalytic doctrines, it cannot be obtained without well-designed extraclinical studies of a kind that have for the most part yet to be attempted. (shrink)

This paper attempts in the first instance to clarify the application of the personal/sub-personal distinction to psychoanalysis and to indicate how this issue is related to that of psychoanalysis" epistemology. It is argued that psychoanalysis may be regarded either as a form of personal psychology, or as a form of jointly personal and sub-personal psychology, but not as a form of sub-personal psychology. It is further argued that psychoanalysis indicates a problem with the personal/sub-personal distinction itself as understood by Dennett (...) A revised view of the distinction, which is argued to reflect its true metaphysical significance, is proposed. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...