Cognitive Science and Psychoanalysis KENNETH MARK COLBY ROBERT J. STOLLER University of California, Los Angeles First Published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 365 Broadway Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642 Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA Copyright © 1988 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colby, Kenneth Mark, 1920- Cognitive science and psychoanalysis I Kenneth Mark Colby and Robert J. Stoller. p. cm. Includes bibliographies and index. ISBN 0-8058-0177-4. ISBN 0-88163-076-4 (pbk.) 1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Cognition. I. Stoller, Robert J. II. Title. [DNLM: 1. Cognition. 2. Psychoanalytic Theory. WM 460 C686c] RC506.C59 1988 616.8917--dc 19 DNLM/DLC 87-30118 for Library of Congress CIP Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. We thank Mrs. Flora Degen, our secretary, for her skillful and enthusiastic assistance in this project. This page intentionally left blank Contents 1 INTRODUCTION/l 2 SCIENCE AND COGNITIVE INQUIRY/9 3 PRELIMINARIES/15 4 MERITS AND SHORTCOMINGS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS/25 5 OUR-SCIENCE: NO .REPORTABLE DATA/41 6 OUR-SCIENCE: DATA ON THE ABSENCE OF DATA/47 v vi Contents 7 OUR-SCIENCE: THE OBSERVING-INSTRUMENT/77 8 OUR-SCIENCE: THE TESTS ANALYSTS OFFER/93 9 FOLK PSYCHOLOGY/109 10 HOMUNCTIONALISM/123 11 HOMUNCULOSIS/123 12 COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY/129 13 DEFLECTIONS/141 14 CONCLUSIONS/153 REFERENCES/155 INDEX/163 1 Introduction S*: We wish, in this book, to think through some relations between two fields that are concerned with the mind—cognitive science and psychoanalysis. We intend to examine how they might be connected and contribute to one another. To model something as complex as the mind, cognitive inquiry must use ideas of many fields, among others, psychoanalysis, be­ cause of its concern with feelings, fantasies, desires. To measure the gaps we must cross, consider our first words, "we wish." One could write a history of each discipline in which the question of aims and desire was the crucial issue forming those disciplines; yet the two histories would almost never overlap. We are biased. We view cognitive science as a new, promising, lively field, full of novel concepts and methods about the mind, whereas psychoanalysis is and thinks of itself (at least four days of the week) as being in the doldrums. In this volume, we examine that difference in enthusiasm to show why it exists, what its effects are, and what we guess the future might hold. In regard to the theory of psychoanalysis, we take the position that it is not, as often alleged, a totally dead duck. It stands as a label for a number of ideas about mind that have a history extending indefinitely into the past and a future extending indefinitely forward, the present label "psychoanal­ ysis" dropping away while aspects of it continue to progress. Like other fields of inquiry, the concepts and ideas of psychoanalysis will become something different: new facts and ideas will produce new *When one of us has written a section, his initial will be attached; when both, both initials. But each author has edited every word and added a few of his own. In the case of impasse, the original writer wins. 1 2 Chapter 1 theories and models that will draw from, but not be identical with, aspects of classical psychoanalysis. Many psychoanalytic ideas are fruitless and will disappear. Others will have continuing value for a cognitive science that can improve, transform, or replace psychoan­ alytic theses. In this regard, we shall focus on the question, dear to psychoanalysts, whether psychoanalysis is a science. In arguing that psychoanalysis is not a science, we shall show that few scholars studying this question get to the bottom of the issue. Instead, they start by accepting, as do psychoanalytic theorists, that the reports of what happens in psychoanalytic treatment—the pri­ mary source of the data—are factual, and then they lay out their interpretations of the significance of facts for theory. We, on the other hand, question the status of the facts. We limit the dimensions of this study. First, we leave out much of what cognitive science and psychoanalysis are about, for example, how each performs its daily work or how their inquirers deal with computational systems or psychoanalytic patients. Second, we are concerned mainly with improving ways to model the mind, a conceptual rather than an empirical task. We side with Ziman (1978), who said: The most sincere account that we can give of the attempt to build a science of human behavior . . . emphasizes ignorance rather than reliable knowledge. More specifically, however, to make a rational assessment of our ignorance on a particular topic-to identify enigmas and formulate consensible questions—is itself an important scientific activity, (p. 148) Our purpose is not to discuss plans for inventing replicas of a person, such as a machine that learns, plays chess like a human, speaks, understands language, thinks, or desires. We are considering only computational models that will simulate aspects of mind suffi­ ciently for us, by continuously improving the model, to understand more accurately how the mind works. Griinbaum (1983, 1984), has in the last decade or more investigated the claims of psychoanalysis to be a science. He has examined these claims intensively from many angles: the pronouncements of Freud and his followers; whether psychoanalytic theories can ever be tested; whether data gathered in treatment can be used to do anything more than corroborate; the thesis (in disagreement with Popper, 1971) that some analytic ideas can be examined and refuted in the clinical situation; the efforts of experimentalists to verify psychoanalytic ideas; the hermeneuticists' reformation; errors in the logic of psychoanalytic arguments. Introduction 3 We believe Grunbaum's examination is more advanced> more sophisticated than psychoanalysis warrants. Grunbaum's oversight is his generosity in accepting analysts' claims that what they report as happening actually happened and only then battering the conclu­ sions they derive therefrom. An example of his charitableness about the data is his disagreeing with Ricoeur (1974), who insists that "psychoanalysis does not satisfy the standards of the sciences of observation, and the 'facts' it deals with are not verifiable by multiple, independent observers. . . . There are no 'facts' nor any observation of 'facts' in psychoanalysis but rather the interpretation of a narrated history" (p. 186). (We, on the other hand, agree with Ricoeur, at least on this point that what is reported are "not facts.") When Griinbaum turns to discussing the data, he says that " 'clinical data' are here construed as findings coming from within the psychoanalytic treatment sessions" (Laudan, 1983, p. 172). But "in­ sofar as the credentials of psychoanalytic theory are currently held to rest on clinical findings, as most of its official spokesmen would have us believe, the dearth of acceptable and probatively cogent clinical data renders these credentials quite weak" (pp. 173-4). Our position is even more sharply negative: It is not the dearth of but the impossibility of getting inspectable observations agreed on by others that wrecks the scientific pretenses of psychoanalysis. The problem is not "that data from the couch ought to be discounted as being inadmissibly contaminated" by such effects as suggestibility (p. 175) but, even worse, that we can never know what the data from the couch are. Psychoanalytic evidence is hearsay, first when the patient reports his or her version of an experience and second when the analyst reports to an audience. Given that problem, the rest of Grunbaum's argu­ ments for and against psychoanalysis as science are premature if not superfluous. Farrell (1981), on the other hand, is constantly alert to the flaw in "the material of the case." For instance, regarding Freud, he says, "No notes are, or ever could be, anything like a full account of what happened. Reference to [his] posthumously published notes shows us that. . . they were to a large extent abstracts from and summaries of what happened" (p. 58). Or, "The impact which a patient makes on [an analyst] is typically so great and so immediate that it strikes him as absurd and downright ignorant to suggest that, in his reports, he is 'doctoring' or 'filtering' or 'reconstructing' what the patient is giving him" (p. 60). Or, "The [case] material is artefact-infected" (p. 129). (And we join those not thrilled by psychoanalysts' claims that each psychoanalytic treatment is an experiment, as that word is used in science. We find it honorable enough—no mean contribution to