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Must Psychoanalysis be Scientific?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

J. R. King*
Affiliation:
Middlesex Hospital, London W1
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In spite of the vast strides forward made by the brain sciences this century, the gap between our understanding of the brain and our understanding of the mind remains uncomfortably wide. At one end of the scale, physical scientists scratch patiently away at the chemistry of receptor sites on cell membranes, at the other, clinicians make brilliant deductions by sheer intuition, and in between is a hazy land. As the pendulum now swings back towards a biological approach to psychiatry, we hear again the old assertion that the only true knowledge can be obtained by objective observation; subjective intuition must therefore be suspect, an unreliable and intangible entity. What validity is there in this argument?

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1984

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