ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses metascientific misapprehension of psychoanalysis. The miscomprehension of Freud's psychology is seen clearly in the protracted, noiseful, and generally sterile "debate", particularly among Anglo-American academics, about whether this psychology is disproven or disprovable. By 1900, Freud came to see the metapsychological enterprise as a mix of quasi-biological and psychological generalizations. For psychoanalysis still has much to teach people about psychic reality, about the human subject, and about the question of scientific pursuits. An effort to reappraise psychoanalysis without metapsychological preconceptions is now required. For despite all its trappings of naturalistic scientism, ego psychology incorrigibly forecloses people apprehension of psychoanalytic discourse as science itself. Pointing to the disputation and misapprehension that surround psychoanalysis, the chapter argues that to approach Freud's psychology anew, people must relinquish metapsychological, ego-psychological, and all other extrapsychoanalytic preconceptions of what this psychology comprises.
