ABSTRACT
Popper claimed that psychoanalysis is doomed to be a pseudo-science because the psychoanalytic idea of resistance is always available to be used to explain away each and every negative instance. And, of course, the cause of a negative instance in psychoanalysis – a verbal denial or no change when a theoretically and experientially plausible interpretation of a symptom is given – may be the effect of the patient’s resistance. Popper developed a logical model of science, ruling out inductive thinking and emphasising the deductive testing of theories, to which he claimed psychoanalysis was unable to conform. In natural science, that logical method is a hypothetico-deductive one, which was laid out in Popper’s classic treatise. Einstein’s relativity theory has a high probability but it is not deductively proven to be true, even when its probability has been recently increased by the discovery of the gravitational waves predicted by it.
