‘Freud’s Permanent Revolution’: could psychoanalysis be a new kind of science?

Officially, ‘Freud’s Permanent Revolution’ (Nagel 1994a) is a measured endorsement of two recent defences of psychoanalysis within a wide-ranging reflection on its nature and significance. Within the NYRB debate, however, its effect is to throw Crews’ and Grünbaum’s conceptions of psychoanalysis and of empirical science itself into disarray. This is the angle from which I shall approach Nagel’s review. Again, the aim is not yet to evaluate Freud’s metapsychology as such, but to show that without it, Nagel’s case fares little better than Grünbaum’s.