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[ Burying Freud Homepage | Freud's Seduction Theory Homepage ] I'm puzzled. In the responses to Ivan Goldberg's anti-psychoanalytic posting, I find people repeating the canard that psychoanalysis is 1) untested and 2) untestable. Can it be that the people on this list do not know that there is a large experimental literature by conventional psychologists who in fact test psychoanalysis? Some areas get confirmation. (Interestingly, libidinal stages of development do.) Other areas are disconfirmed or, at least, not confirmed, notably female development. The literature is so large that there are several books summarizing it. I can only give sketchy citations because I am away from my reference books, but: a book by Sears in the early 1950s; Fisher and Greenberg; Paul Kline, Fact and Fancy in Freudian Theory. The Sampson-Weiss group in San Francisco has even worked out ways of testing therapeutic interventions. I can understand why people like Frederick Crews or Professor Tallis would perpetuate the canard. I cannot understand why those of us who take psychoanalysis seriously persist in repeating the completely false assertion that psychoanalysis is untestable when it has, in large part, been in fact tested. --Best,
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[ Burying Freud Homepage | Freud's Seduction Theory Homepage ] I'm puzzled. In the responses to Ivan Goldberg's anti-psychoanalytic posting, I find people repeating the canard that psychoanalysis is 1) untested and 2) untestable. Can it be that the people on this list do not know that there is a large experimental literature by conventional psychologists who in fact test psychoanalysis? Some areas get confirmation. (Interestingly, libidinal stages of development do.) Other areas are disconfirmed or, at least, not confirmed, notably female development. The literature is so large that there are several books summarizing it. I can only give sketchy citations because I am away from my reference books, but: a book by Sears in the early 1950s; Fisher and Greenberg; Paul Kline, Fact and Fancy in Freudian Theory. The Sampson-Weiss group in San Francisco has even worked out ways of testing therapeutic interventions. I can understand why people like Frederick Crews or Professor Tallis would perpetuate the canard. I cannot understand why those of us who take psychoanalysis seriously persist in repeating the completely false assertion that psychoanalysis is untestable when it has, in large part, been in fact tested. --Best,
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