O0Y0<)190*(!):!2!1 By Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber 6#.($'-/.*$#! What kind of science is psychoanalysis, actually? What did Freud mean when he defined psychoanalysis as a special “science of the unconscious”? As is well-known, before his resolute turn to the natural sciences, the young Freud was particularly interested in philosophy and the humanities. He focused on medical and neurological research in Ernst Brücke’s laboratory at the Institute of Physiology. It was here that he first encountered the kind of strict, positivist understanding of science to which he remained committed throughout his life. However, as we are aware, Freud was to later turn away from contemporary neurology owing to what he considered the methodological limitations of this discipline in research on the psyche. He defined “The Interpretation of Dreams”, the key work of psychoanalysis, as “pure psychology”. Freud’s self-understanding was that of a physician whose methods of empirical observation paralleled those of a natural scientist. As Joel Whitebook (2010) notes, Freud’s aspiration towards precise, “empirical” examination of hypothesis and theories protected him from his own inclination to wild speculation. As a “philosophical physician” Freud was thus able to establish a new “science of the unconscious”. For the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), defining psychoanalysis as an independent, “psychological science of the unconscious” has proved an integral aspect in the history of its success. The fact that Freud considered integrating psychoanalysis into the medical organization of August Forel’s “medical psychology and psychotherapy”, or even into the “order for ethics and culture” as early as 1909, is a well-known fact. Fortunately, on New Year’s Eve 1910, he instead opted to found his own, independent organization, the IPA (see Falzeder, 2010). It was this decision that secured the independence of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline with its own research methodology and institution, independent of the university system. Freud would later repeatedly emphasize that psychoanalysis merited autonomy as a discipline and was not to be “swallowed by the medical faculty” (Freud, 1926, p. 248), “but rather, as ‘the psychology of the unconscious’ (Tiefenpsychologie) – the discipline of the unconscious –, could become indispensable to all sciences associated with the emergence of human culture and its great institutions of art, religion and social systems…” (Freud, 1926, p. 248) Over the course of its one-hundred year history the specificity of psychoanalytic science became increasingly defined. Psychoanalysis developed a differentiated, independent method for the examination of its specific object of research, namely, unconscious conflicts and fantasies. International psychoanalysts summarized their insights in countless papers. They acquired such insights by way of thorough-going studies of different groups of patients, and by applying their “specific psychoanalytical research methods” to the study of unconscious fantasies and conflicts by observing free associations, dreams, transference and countertransference reactions as well as transformation processes in the psychoanalytic relationship etc. Moreover, as is the case with all other contemporary disciplines, it has set its own criteria of quality and truth e.g. the meticulous investigation of the analysand’s conscious as well as unconscious responses to interpretations and their influence on his transformation processes. Several discourses 1 This paper is based on the Research Lecture given at centenary celebration of the IPA in London, March 2010 and its elaboration in Leuzinger-Bohleber, in press. CL .01230/1.40/5&&'67894/0/571.8/5&&/6648./1.40&
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