ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and science have a long and intricate history. We may ask: What kind of science is psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis a scientific discipline or is it better labeled as art, a cultural movement, or even an ideology? I will argue that psychoanalysis is a scientific discipline, but a distinctive one. I will present my view on philosophy of science and ask how psychoanalysis gathers and develops knowledge about the human mind. As psychoanalysts, we embrace knowledge – based on observations in the analytic situation – in an atypical manner. Our ideals are not – as for many other scientific enterprises – falsification on par with Karl Popper. Scientific ideals are for most analysts not inspired by experimental design. In this chapter, I will have two lines of thoughts on scientific ideals in psychoanalysis: First, I will argue that within psychoanalysis the status of theories is atypical, if I am correct, they are atypically especially if we compare the status they have to theories in other academic disciplines. And I aim at describing some characteristics with our take on theories. Second, I will argue that psychoanalysis has a specific epistemology which partly can shed light on the status of our theories.
