At 07:40 PM 2/14/99 -0500, Doug wrote: >There's a big difference between using psychoanalysis as a way of >understanding why people think, feel, and act the way they do and using it >as a therapy. Most kinds of psychotherapy have terrible success records. >Psychotropic drugs can help a bit, but they rarely cure. I think you are mixing up a genuine search for "understanding why people think, feel and act the way they do" with efforts to save an intellectual enterprise form a total collapse. Imre Lakatos talks about a 'scientific research programmes' or a strategies of creating conceptual devices to save theories in which symbol manipulators have vested interests from empirical refutation. Lakatos calls them "problemshifts" - they are usually of the degenerative variety because they limit the empirical scope of the theory they seek to save. Lou is absolutely right that the Freudian enterprise is totally bankrupt as science - re-defining it as the understanding of "human nature" is a last ditch attempt to keep it afloat by shedding any pretense to empirical validity (ultimately degenerative problemshift) - it becomes the realm of subjective interpretations that cannot be proved right or wrong. It is but a form of a psychotherapy cult, a scheme of milking frustrated yuppies by unscrupulous psycho-charlatans. Shamanism may be a form of quackery as well, by at least it appears to be much less venal in comparison. regards, Wojtek
