Psychoanalytic proof: Revisiting Freud's Tally Argument.

This paper explores the notion of proof in clinical psychoanalysis by reconsidering an argument Freud made concerning the relation between successful psychoanalytic treatment and truth, dubbed the "Tally Argument" by the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum. I first reiterate criticisms of Grünbaum's reconstruction of this argument, which bring out the degree to which he has misunderstood Freud. I then offer my own interpretation of the argument and the reasoning that underlies its key premise. Drawing from this discussion, I explore three forms of proof, each inspired also by analogies with other disciplines. Laurence Perrine's "The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry" stimulates my discussion of inferential proof, the relevant form of which involves proving an interpretation through a strong enough Inference to the Best Explanation. Mathematical proof stimulates my discussion of apodictic proof, of which psychoanalytic insight is a fitting example. Finally, holism in legal reasoning stimulates my discussion of holistic proof, which provides a reliable means by which therapeutic success can verify epistemic conclusions. These three forms of proof can play a crucial role in ascertaining psychoanalytic truth.

Unconscious Emotion and Free-Energy: A Philosophical and Neuroscientific Exploration.

Unconscious emotions are of central importance to psychoanalysis. They do, however, raise conceptual problems. The most pertinent concerns the intuition, shared by Freud, that consciousness is essential to emotion, which makes the idea of unconscious emotion seem paradoxical. In this paper, I address this paradox from the perspective of the philosopher R. C. Roberts' account of emotions as concern-based construals. I provide an interpretation of this account in the context of affective neuroscience and explore the form of Freudian repression that emotions may be subject to under such an interpretation. This exploration draws on evidence from research on alexithymia and utilises ideas from free-energy neuroscience. The free-energy framework, moreover, facilitates an account of repression that avoids the homunculus objection and coheres with recent work on hysteria.

Clinical Reasoning, Grünbaum, and Freud's "Cleverest Dreamer" Dream Interpretation.

The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum has repeatedly criticized Freud's reasoning, claiming that much of it is overtly fallacious. One such criticism that has gone without reply concerns Freud's controversial response to the counterwish objection to his theory of dreams, that the reason some dreams appear to represent the frustration of a wish rather than the fulfillment of one is that they actually represent the dreamer's wish to prove Freud wrong. Grünbaum contends that in giving such a response Freud commits several glaring fallacies. But Grünbaum's analysis is mistaken and misrepresents Freud's thought. Contrary to Grünbaum's interpretation of Freud's reasoning as deductive, this reasoning is best construed as a form of "inference to the best explanation."

The case for the Freud-Breuer theory of hysteria: A response to Grünbaum's foundational objection to psychoanalysis.

In his influential critique of psychoanalysis, philosopher Adolf Grünbaum has repeatedly objected that the psychoanalytic enterprise has a foundational flaw in that its fundamental claim that repressed thoughts can be pathogenic cannot be sustained. His criticism focuses on Freud and Breuer's reasoning toward this claim in Studies on Hysteria, which Grünbaum rejects mainly on the ground that there is an alternative explanation, the placebo hypothesis, that Freud and Breuer have failed to rule out. I argue against this by showing in detail why Freud and Breuer's claim about the pathogenicity of repressed thoughts can be sustained on the evidence presented in Studies. Providing such a detailed response to Grünbaum's objection is important for several reasons, including that it illustrates how the possibility of the influence of suggestion that critics often bring against psychoanalysis need not be fatal, thereby offering an alternative, complementary solution to the problem of suggestion to one recently proposed.

Self-insight.

Insight is an important notion in psychoanalysis, as it is regarded as the main mediator of psychic change in therapy. In this article I provide an account of a specific kind of insight, which I call self-insight. Self-insight is that which lies at the roots of what Bell and Leite (Bell, D., and A. Leite. 2016. "Experiential self-understanding." The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 97 (2): 305-332) describe as experiential self-understanding, a process of increasing articulate awareness of one's psychic life. So conceived, self-insight has four key characteristics: (1) it is distinct from merely intellectual self-knowledge, (2) it arises directly out of first-person experience, (3) it encompasses a lived perspective, and (4) it often requires the overcoming of resistance. My account of self-insight makes use of the notion of construal, a mental state that is constitutive of emotion and plays an important role in motivation. Specifically, I propose that one gains self-insight when one becomes insightfully conscious of a previously unconscious construal, which involves construing one's construal as the construal it is. This account of self-insight shows how it exhibits the key characteristics described above.