I want to say something about the falsifiability part of Bloom’s discussion. What Bloom misses is that psychoanalysis takes place in a clinical context. The core claims of psychoanalysis, as expressed above by Shedler and Solms, are well-supported by a large body of evidence in psychology and cognitive science, and although they can in principle be falsified, they aren’t easy to refute. In the setting of a psychotherapeutic relationship, the core claims provide a basis for developing idiographic hypotheses that apply to the person sitting in front of the psychotherapist, taking into account the psychological development and dynamics of that particular patient. It is also the case that hypotheses vary in the confidence we assign to them: hypotheses can, in the beginning, be mere suggestions, offered with very little conviction in them, and the confidence in them increases or decreases as a function of how well or poorly they explain clinical data in psychotherapy. In the clinical context, this testing and falsifiability takes place not via formal experiments but by considerations such as how well the hypothesis explains the person’s past psychological development, what other competing explanations exist and what their merits are, to what degree the explanation resonates with the patient, and how well the hypothesis explains subsequent observations that come up in the course of psychotherapy (View Highlight)
psicoanálisis psicoterapia investigación evidencia crítica
Dogmatism in the psychotherapy context is not easy to discover and scrutinize. But this is also why the discipline encourages practices by which such detection and correction can take place: an insistence on the need for rigorous training, on-going forms of peer supervision even during independent practice, avenues for presenting and discussing cases, and scholarly avenues to scrutinize and develop the theoretical foundations of the discipline. It is through this form of error-correction that the discipline of psychoanalysis has evolved. Generations of psychoanalysts have criticized the psychoanalytic ideas proposed by Freud and his colleagues as inadequate explanations of patient experiences and clinician observations in psychotherapy. (View Highlight)