Why thematic kinships between events do not attest their causal linkage

Adolf Grünbaum

pp. 477-494

in: James BROWN, Jürgen Mittelstrass (eds), An intimate relation, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

There are strongly diverging diagnoses of the defects of psychoanalytic theory. In a paper on schizophrenia, the German philosopher and professional psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1974, p. 91) wrote: "In Freud's work we are dealing in fact with [a] psychology of meaning, not causal explanation as Freud himself thinks". The father of psychoanalysis, we learn, fell into a "confusion of meaning connections with causal connections". After Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur has elaborated the patronizing claim that Freud basically misunderstood what he himself had wrought. As Ricoeur tells us in his book Freud and Philosophy (1970, p. 359), psychoanalytic theory is a hermeneutic enterprise, as opposed to a natural science: "psychoanalysis is an exegetical science dealing with the relationships of meaning between symptoms and repressed instinctual mentation".

Cited authors

Ricoeur Paul

Jaspers Karl

Freud Sigmund