Is Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory Pseudo-Scientific By Karl Popper's Criterion of Demarcation?

Abstract

K arl Popper has indicted Freud's psychoanalytic theory as a non-falsifiable pseudo-science or myth ( Popper 1963 , chapter 1 ). And he has claimed that traditional inductive methods of theory-validation do accord good scientific credentials to psychoanalysis. Hence Popper adduced Freudian theory to lend poignancy to his general castigation of inductive confirmation as a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudo-science or non-science. Popper's censure of Freud and his general indictment of inductivism have each had considerable influence in our intellectual culture at large. Thus, the biologist Peter Medawar (1975) has endorsed both of Popper's complaints with gusto, while the literary critic Frederick Crews credits Popper with having vindicated his own repudiation of Freudian explanations ( Crews 1976; 1965, pp. 125–137). And very recently the cosmologist Hermann Bondi echoed Popper's anti-inductivism amid extolling the falsifiability criterion of demarcation between science and pseudo-science as enunciated by Popper (Bondi 1976) . According to this criterion, the hallmark of the scientific status of a theory is that empirical findings which would refute it are logically possible: Any such theory is said to be empirically “ falsifiable ” in the sense that the actual occurrence of findings contrary to it would be the warrant of its falsity.

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