Experimental psychology and psychoanalysis: what we can learn from a century of misunderstanding *

This chapter presents a personal and informal ethnography of the subcultures of psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. It presents a case study in incommensurability. Experimental psychology is cumulative, and strong enough to support various kinds of technology, which is the most straightforward criterion of a successful natural science. Psychoanalysis increases personal insight. Experimental psychology is dominated by convergent thinking, so, of course, psychologists have difficulty with a type of thought that is divergent in every respect, whose basic method, free association, is the paradigm of divergent thinking. There are psychoanalysts like J. Bowlby who would be at home in a department of experimental psychology; there are experimental psychologists like Keith Oatley who are at home in psychoanalysis. The chapter provides a presentation of the different enterprises of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. It also talks about the different cognitive styles.