Abstract

In his paper on 'The Science of Psychoanalysis,' Lacewing helpfully distinguishes a central psychodynamic model of the mind, elaborated in the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, from certain of its metapsychological and etiological theories. Critics who view psychoanalysis as unscientific have tended to focus on the lack of evidential support for certain of its developmental claims or the lack of reliability and validity in its theoretical posits. Lacewing claims, however, that the model contained in the clinical theory is much more scientifically respectable than its critics have made out. The data may not always be in, but Lacewing's argument is that there is nothing pseudoscientific about the central model that...