To all:
It seems that Avner Govrin is saying that a belief in empirical testing is a
form of psychopathology. This is a switch on an ancient Freudian tactic (label
the critic as sick); Avner Govrin,  paraphrasing Stephen Mitchell, says the
methodologies which which lead to questions about the validity of
psychoanalysis are "contaminated" by unrealistic "ideologies". Same stuff, a
bit more sophisticated.

Remember Samuel Johnson's response to Bishop Berekeley's solipsism.
I had though that Mitchell's self proclaimed "paradigm switch" had already
played itself out. I have not found it yet adopted by any other than his own
followers.

No one outside of psychoanalysis is going to take it seriously as long as it
continues to describe itself as superlatively pure while all other approaches
are fatally tainted. This tactic is preaching to the choir; it only alienates
others.

Howard D. Eisman, Ph.D.



Howard D. Eisman, Ph.D.
Aner Govrin wrote:

> Steve Mitchell was one of the main spokseman of a group of analysts that
> saved Psychoanalysis from a devestating epistemological fate.  Imagine
> Eisman's ideologies (which is Logical Positivism with its
> sharp dichotomy between legitimate and unlegitimate knowledge) were still
> the main discourse of western philosophy and culture today. If they were,
> if people thought that a valid theory is only an empirical one,
> psychoanalysis  could not have survived. Fortunately, our culture has
> changed. It seems now, as Docherty pointed out, that Enlightment itself is
> not the great demystifying force which will reveal and unmask ideology.
> Rather, it is precisely the locus of ideology, thoroughly contaminated
> internally by the ideological assumption that the world can match our
> reasoning about it. Briliantly, Mitchell (with Hoffman, Aron, Benjamin,
> Stolorow, Orange, Atwood, Spezzano and Renik, to name just a few) was one
> of the first to acknowledge this epistemological shift and to apply it to
> psychoanalysis (of course, there is a price that psychoanalysis will have
> to pay for being postmodern).
> I think the best answer to Eisman's critique is the following quotation
> from Mitchell's  book "Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis" (1997):
> "Because of the swing of pendulum away from scientism most of us were
> brought up on, we are particulary vulnerable to a clinical state I have
> observed in psychoanalysis that I have come to think of as the "Grunbaum
> Syndrome". This may afflict psychologist-analysts more then others: I don't
> know. I have come down with it several times myself.  It begins with some
> exposure to the contemporary philosopher Adolph Grunbaum's attack on
> psychoanalysis. Grunbaum wants to indict psychoanalysis for not meeting the
> criteria he designates as necessary for an empirical, scientific
> discipline. Since the analyst's interpretations operate at least partially
> through suggestion, he argues, there is no way of testing their validity in
> any independent fashion. What follows (after reading Grunbaum) is several
> days of guilty anguish for not having involved oneself in analytic
> research. There may be outbreaks of efforts to remember how analysis of
> variance works, perhaps even pulling a 30-year-old statistics text off the
> shelf and quickly putting it back. There may be sleep disturbance and
> distractions from work. However, it invariably passes in a day or so, and
> the patient is able to return to a fully productive life. The most striking
> thing about Grunbaum's impact on psychoanalysis is the extraordinary plat
> his critique has attracted despite its almost irrelavence to contemporary
> clinicians. The reason virtually all clinicians suffering from the Grunbaum
> syndrome put the statistics text back on the shelf within a day or two is
> that clinicians tend to be satisfied with kinds of confirmation different
> from the singular empirical one Grunbaum insists on" (p. 206-7).
>
> Aner Govrin - Clinical Psychologist
> Tel Aviv