Research on the couch: single-case studies, subjectivity and scientific knowledge

Robert Hinshelwood’s new book is a valuable contribution to the debates concerning
the scientific status of psychoanalysis, and about how psychoanalytic theories can find
a rational justification. Hinshelwood’s primary interest is in the validity of
psychoanalytic theories of the mind, not in the ‘evidence-based’ measures of treatment
outcome which now receive most attention. He has concerns about the proliferation of
psychoanalytic theories, and about the difficulty in selecting between competing
theories in the way that he believes natural science does much more successfully. He
describes the present situation where there are overlapping and ill-defined
psychoanalytic theories, clustered in different schools and followings, with little capacity
for resolution of differences, as a Tower of Babel. In this view Hinshelwood is taking up
concerns previously set out in studies of psychoanalytic practice for example by Robert
Wallerstein (1988) and David Tuckett (2005). His book proposes a critical procedure by
which competing theories can be subjected to decisive empirical test.