At 21.59 02/01/2001 EST, Diane Gartland wrote:
>...I would recommend the
>reading of Drew Westen who has been tireless in his work of empirical testing
>of psychoanalytic theory over the past 20 years or so. His article "The
>scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed
>psychological science" (Nov.,1998) in the Psychological Bulletin, Vol.124,
>#3, 333-371 is a comprehensive treatment on the subject. It can be downloaded
>from apa.org (about 68 pages) if you have the psyc-info access.


I would add another reference by Drew Westen:

Westen D., THE SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES: IS FREUD REALLY
DEAD?
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1999, 47, 4: 1061-1106.

This is the summary:
At regular intervals for over half a century, critiques of Freud and
psychoanalysis have emerged in the popular media and intellectual circles,
usually declaring that Freud has died some new and agonizing death, and that
the enterprise he created should be buried along with him like artifacts in
the tomb of an Egyptian king.  Although the critiques take many forms, one
of the central claims has long been that unconscious processes, like other
psychoanalytic constructs, lack any basis in scientific research.  In recent
years, however, a large body of experimental research has emerged in a
number of independent literatures (such as research on unconscious thought,
unconscious affective learning, unconscious prejudice, and the differential
neural circuitry underlying conscious and unconscious processes) documenting
the most fundamental tenet of psychoanalysis, that much of mental life is
unconscious, and that this extends to cognitive, affective, and motivational
processes.  Examination of this body of research points both to revisions in
the psychoanalytic understanding of unconscious processes and to the
conclusion that, based on controlled scientific investigations alone (that
is, without even considering clinical data), the repeated broadside attacks
on psychoanalysis are no longer tenable.


Paolo Migone