Revisiting Freud

摘要

Opposition to Freudianism is likely to be at least as much a product of ideological antipathy as of disinterested intellectual disagreement. Freud represents his theories as contributions to science-but those who nowadays reject them do so, for the most part, not so much by citing contrary empirical evidence, as by describing them, in the terminology of one of their bitterest critics, Karl Popper, as pseudo-science. But, as Popper himself admits, "the criterion of demarcation [between science and pseudoscience] cannot be an absolutely sharp one but will itself have degrees" (Popper 1963,252). The demarcation line is bound to be uncertain, because both the concept of 'science' and that of 'pseudoscience,' as Popper and others operate with them, are terms, respectively, of approval and disapproval, rather than neutrally defined philosophical concepts.