Psychoanalysis:Pseudoscience?

[Garbarsardar]

"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort" (Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Feb. 1, 1900).

"Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilization. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellectual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era."
Webster (1995 : 438)

The first step to judge if something is pseudoscience, (and you can replace here psychoanalysis with astrology or whatever you like) is to decide on a demarcation criterion, meaning a way to make the safest distonction between science and pseudoscience.

Demarcation has always been a thorny issue. An obvious criterion would be this of verifiability and falsifiability. Well psychoanalysis is vaguely testable as a treatment, and easily avoids falsifiability by adding more unexplained bits and pieces to an already muddled theoretical pool.

I will borrow Haggard's Principle for astrology:

A theory or discipline which purports to be scientific is pseudoscientific if and only if:
A.it has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems;

B.the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations.

This principle captures, I believe, what is most importantly unscientific about Psychoanalysis. First, Psychoanalysis is dramatically unprogressive, in that it has changed little and has added nothing to its explanatory power since the time of Freud. Second, problems such as the universality of the psychosexual stages of development (anal, oral, etc) are not addressed. Third, there are alternative theories of personality and behavior available: one need not be an uncritical advocate of behaviorist, Cognitive, or Gestalt theories to see that since the nineteenth century psychological theories have been expanding to deal with many of the phenomena which Psychoanalysis explains in terms of magical and unexplained influences. The important point is not that any of these psychological theories is established or true, only that they are growing alternatives to a long-static Psychoanalysis. Fourth and finally, the community of Psychoanalysts is generally unconcerned with advancing Psychoanalysis to deal with outstanding problems or with evaluating the theory in relation to others.4 For these reasons, my criterion marks Psychoanalysis as pseudoscientific.

If Freud had actually cured one of his patients, I might be inclined to be more interested in his theories, but there is little evidence that any were ever cured and quite convincing evidence that many of the cures he claimed were not cures at all. We now know a great deal more about the brain than Freud, who did not have the benefit of brain scans, and we therefore can explain many of his patients' symptoms in terms of organic causes, such as brain tumours, strokes, blows to the head and so on; we know now, as Freud did not, about hormones, Mendel's laws of inheritance, chromosomes. The lack of such knowledge in Freud's day may excuse him, but I don't see how it excuses us for treating such egregious nonsense with respect. Indeed, I'm not even convinced that it excuses him, since he seems to have claimed scientific status for ideas he probably made up off the top of his head and to have claimed cures where none were effected. What is interesting about Freud is his enormous influence on intellectuals and that they continue to take him seriously today...

As Peter Medawar said:

... 'psychoanalysis has now achieved a complete intellectual closure: it explains even why some people disbelieve in it . To other psychoanalysts, of course, it explains that, to me it explains nothing. With irritating 'Olympian glibness' claims to be able to explain everything: A lava flow of ad hoc explanation pours over and around all difficulties, leaving only a few smoothly rounded prominences to mark where they might have lain'

For more on the issue

[morble]

While I definitely don't want to get painted into the corner of having to defend all of psychiatry, I do think you've been overly harsh. For one thing, almost nobody believes in Freud anymore. As a chemist, I admit I also tend toward a sense of disdain toward the so-called soft sciences. But I do think that the development of cognitive psychology has made some great strides in the understanding of human consciousness.

Psychoanalysis is specifically the attempt to apply what has been learned about psychology to live 'sick' human subjects. Personally, I don't have much belief in its efficacy, but I think it's overstating things to say they're still using the same techniques and understanding from 100 years ago without any advancement. (Although, medicine in general still uses some techniques from 1000's of years ago, but doesn't, for example, use leeches much.)

[Garbarsardar]

While I definitely don't want to get painted into the corner of having to defend all of psychiatry, I do think you've been overly harsh. For one thing, almost nobody believes in Freud anymore. As a chemist, I admit I also tend toward a sense of disdain toward the so-called soft sciences. But I do think that the development of cognitive psychology has made some great strides in the understanding of human consciousness.

Don't worry. I hold that corner either I want it or not. I was not chastising psychiatry as a whole, but psychoanalysis as a working paragigm and treatment option. Cognitive psychology gained from the early psychoanalytical insights-although because of their lack of verifiability, we all had to weather the meaningless storm of behaviourism.
That said, cognitive science has come a long way since and has used mostly hard data to support the early findings.

Psychoanalysis is specifically the attempt to apply what has been learned about psychology to live 'sick' human subjects. Personally, I don't have much belief in its efficacy, but I think it's overstating things to say they're still using the same techniques and understanding from 100 years ago without any advancement. (Although, medicine in general still uses some techniques from 1000's of years ago, but doesn't, for example, use leeches much.)

Psychoanalysis was one of the techniques used in the past as a treatment options, but the lack of verifiable results, or the comparative lack of efficience compered to other options (CBT, eclectic, integrated approach) is mainly due to an essentially unchanged and overly rigid theoretical background.
If you see the demarcation criterion A,(it has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems it is evident that medical techniques used a thousand years ago cannot be considered as pseudo-scientific since there is no alternative theory that yielded better results.