Hello Aner:

Well put---I couldn't agree more. The positivist fallacy resurfaces time
and again, each time to my utter surprise and amazement, since it seems
so intellectually bankrupt.

best wishes,

Paul Hamburg

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
>
>