ABSTRACT
Alasdair MacIntyre tends to see psychoanalysis under three different guises: as ideology and ersatz religion for a certain segment of the intelligentsia; as pseudo-science, and as heuristically valuable psychological theory, plausible in part. By ‘behaviourism’, MacIntyre has in mind that family of views which maintains that the link between inner psychological states and specifiable overt behaviour is internal and conceptual. For Bronislaw Malinowski, contrariwise, social scientific explanation should proceed much more along the lines of providing an external corrective to the explanations of an ideal native informant. The moral of the story again is that historical inquiry and the form of explanation proper to it are more at the heart of the social scientific task than are the kind of activities in which natural scientists. The ideology of personal relationships invokes a public sanction in the closed system of psychoanalytic theory.
