Wissenschaftlichkeit in Freud: Scientific Reduction and the Ghost of the Entwurf

Abstract

This thesis began as a general attempt to understand psychoanalysis and its relationship to other disciplines, but the research process was quickly complicated by efforts to reckon with various characterizations of psychoanalysis as a body of theory claiming scientific validity, as a clinical practice asserting its diagnostic accuracy and therapeutic efficacy, as a hermeneutic of interpreting human behavior, and as an epistemological revolution unseating the conscious subject as the sole command of thought and behavior. However, this thesis will not so much offer a definite answer as to how psychoanalysis fits into the larger picture of human knowledge and Wissenschaftlichkeit as it will reflect upon a discourse that tries to locate psychoanalysis with respect to this division between the natural sciences and the humanities and assert, challenge, or circumscribe the domain of validity of psychoanalysis based on its relationship to the natural sciences.