66 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
ideology. He was not claiming that it was a natural science. The German language
and culture of Freud’s day made a distinction between a natural science (Naturwis-
senschaften) and a human science (Geisteswissenschaften). Unfortunately, James
Strachey’s translations in the Standard Edition make Freud seem to be a natural
scientist. However, other scholars (Federn, 1988; Holder, 1988) believe that Freud
clearly saw himself as a human scientist, that is, a humanist or scholar and not a
natural scientist. In order to render Freud’s works more accurate and more human-
istic, a group of language scholars are currently producing an updated translation
of Freud. (See, for example, Freud, 1905/2002.)
Bruno Bettelheim (1982, 1983) was also critical of Strachey’s translations.
He contended that the Standard Edition used precise medical concepts and mislead-
ing Greek and Latin terms instead of the ordinary, often ambiguous, German words
that Freud had chosen. Such precision tended to render Freud more scientific and
less humanistic than he appears to the German reader. For example, Bettelheim,
whose introduction to Freud was in German, believed that Freud saw psychoana-
lytic therapy as a spiritual journey into the depths of the soul (translated by Strachey
as “mind”) and not a mechanistic analysis of the mental apparatus.
As a result of Freud’s 19th-century German view of science, many contempo-
rary writers regard his theory-building methods as untenable and rather unscientific
(Breger, 2000; Crews, 1995, 1996; Sulloway, 1992; Webster, 1995). His theories
were not based on experimental investigation but rather on subjective observations
that Freud made of himself and his clinical patients. These patients were not repre-
sentative of people in general but came mostly from the middle and upper classes.
Apart from this widespread popular and professional interest, the question
remains: Was Freud scientific? Freud’s (1915/1957a) own description of science
permits much room for subjective interpretations and indefinite definitions:
We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and
sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most
exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity
consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group,
classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to
avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from
somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone. (p. 117)
Perhaps Freud himself left us with the best description of how he built his
theories. In 1900, shortly after the publication of Interpretation of Dreams, he
wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, confessing that “I am actually not at all a man
of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by tempera-
ment nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer... with all the curiosity, daring,
and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort” (Freud, 1985, p. 398).
Although Freud at times may have seen himself as a conquistador, he also
believed that he was constructing a scientific theory. How well does that theory
meet the six criteria for a useful theory that we identified in Chapter 1?
Despite serious difficulties in testing Freud’s assumptions, researchers have
conducted studies that relate either directly or indirectly to psychoanalytic theory.
Thus, we rate Freudian theory about average in its ability to generate research.
Second, a useful theory should be falsifiable. Because much of the research
evidence consistent with Freud’s ideas can also be explained by other models,