Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Guénaël Visentini. Pourquoi la psychanalyse est une science. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2015. 280 pp.

Reviewed by David Hafner

15 January 2016

In his recent book, Guénaël Visentini valiantly argues that the status of truth and knowledge in science must be reevaluated if psychoanalysis is ever to approach the sciences. Sigmund Freud’s work not only attests to the subjective division of humans but reflects on the production of analytic knowledge, one which obliges the deconstruction of the scientific ideal. Visentini affirms that after Freud, one can no longer speak of science but rather of the sciences, each with its measures and methods and each with its object of research. Throughout his lifetime of work, Freud created an epistemology the “analytic epistemology of psychoanalysis.” Visentini uses the term analytic epistemology because a philosophic epistemology of psychoanalysis already exists in the reflections of Adolf Grünbaum and Karl Popper. Psychoanalysis would thus be the science of psychical functioning, one still lacking mathematical formalization, but a science nonetheless.

            The scientific model of the Docta Ignorantia does orient the psychoanalytic clinic to the scientific method. The analyst presumes no knowledge of his patient. He treats every new patient as a singular enigma, the only prejudice being that speech has value. This was the incomprehensible discovery of Bertha Pappenheim that Breuer shared with Freud. In some inexplicable manner, speech affects psychological suffering. Unfortunately, the very ethical stance that makes psychoanalysis so potent, accentuating the uniqueness of each human being, makes any generalization of results astronomically complicated. How then can we hope to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and a science that excises subjectivity to obtain the precision of QED?

            Visentini’s thesis “considers psychoanalysis as a minimal science,” and he “poses the radical question to the analytic field: must the analytic field rid itself of a large portion of the erudition it has acquired and reorganize its knowledge more minimally?” Do psychoanalysts need to jettison the majority of theory in favor of formalizing the clinical evidence? Such counsel harmonizes well with Noam Chomsky’s views on psychology. Chomsky proposes that contemporary psychology is a kind of Aristotelian science, pre-Galilean in that it has yet to concede its ignorance and begin studying the elementary aspects of the human psyche; that behaviorism entails “just the study of what you observe . . . a very strange notion as though physics were called meter-reading science.” Psychology in general has not yet succeeded in obtaining the simplified elegance of the hard sciences. One would do well to remember, however, that contemporary science is far from the omniscience that popular culture attributes to it. Contemporary science exists at the knife’s edge between ignorance and the inexplicable, where, as Neil Degrasse Tyson notes, the temptation to retreat to the supernatural is for many people nearly irresistible. For that matter, recent research by Aaron O’Connell’s recent discovery of macroscopic quantum superposition indicates that the deterministic, classical worldview that most of us consider accurate, is not the whole picture.

            Does a science require quantification, or can it simply be descriptive? In other words, can we justify the scientific claims of psychoanalysis, a praxis radically opposed to quantification? For Visentini, the transition from science to a plurality of sciences, installs itself upon the refusal to limit science to the mathematical quantification of physical and chemical properties. If it is not the object of research that defines science, it can only be the investigative rigor of observation. Here Visentini agrees directly with Freud. Freud and Visentini both consider psychoanalysis as the science of the unconscious or of psychological reality. Such a view can only justify itself through a materialistic definition of meaning. Visentini, as did Jacques Lacan, maintains this perspective. “The meaning of a psychological phenomenon is thus quite literally the linguistic direction—the precise and always singular succession of words or letters—by which a libidinal investment is discharged.” In Visentini’s reading, the Freudian discovery leaves no room for what one “means to say,” there is only what is said and what remains unsaid. Through this fidelity to the letter, psychoanalysis exits from the field of erudition or speculation, approaching the field of modern science. Modern science, after all, is that which by means of formalization escapes any reference to contemplation or erudition. At first sight, the question of psychoanalysis as a science would not seem to resolve itself through its quantifiability, insofar as it treats every patient uniquely. But Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis does involve quantitative truth through its materialist orientation. In the end, the psychoanalyst’s compass is a sort of binary quantitative system, spoken verses unspoken words. For Lacan, this motérialiste orientation constitutes the precise path by which psychoanalysis escapes the undesirable fate of a delusional psychogenesis.

            Karl Popper famously criticized psychoanalysis for lacking fallibility. For Popper, no positive induction is certain; the only possible certainty follows the refutation of a theory via a negative result. Falsification thus functions for Popper as the indispensable criterion as to when a theory may be considered scientific. Popper concludes, psychoanalytic theories are not disprovable and therefore cannot be scientific. This may be so for psychoanalytic theories. It is definitely not the case in the psychoanalytic clinic, where the presence of a word or phoneme in the patient’s speech is indisputable, even if subsequent theories of meaning are unscientific. This is the core of Visentini’s argument; by adhering to literal speech, the psychoanalyst treats the phonemes and words of his patients speech materialistically. In a way, the same is true of contemporary physics. One is in the realm of science for as long as it involves mathematics and formalization, but once one attempts to elaborate the knowledge in theory, one has in a sense left the field of science. “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.”[1] The difference of course is that physics founds itself in mathematics. Psychoanalysis founds itself in speech. Can a field of knowledge so intimately bound to the caprice of words be formalized? Visentini claims that yes it can so long one hears the other’s speech literally, with little or no reference to signification.

            The trick, as always, will be how to expand the field of rigorous knowledge, without bringing obscurantism and occultism into the fold, a risk that both Freud and Carl Sagan observed: “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.”[2] In such a climate, how then will we formalize psychoanalysis into science in such a way as to lose neither the hypothesis of the unconscious, nor the talking cure?

[1] T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (Orlando, Fla., 1973), p. 19.

[2] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York, 1996), p. 26.