Sigmund Freud · Science

The Contested Legacy: Is Psychoanalysis a Science?

The great argument over Freud: Popper’s charge that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable pseudoscience; the empirical critiques that followed; and the honest reckoning with what survived (the unconscious, defence, transference, childhood’s weight) and what did not - Freud as, in effect, the twentieth century’s weather.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Popper attacked psychoanalysis as unfalsifiable (it can explain anything, so it risks nothing), that later critics pressed empirical and evidential objections, and that the honest verdict separates what survived from what failed. Explain the falsifiability charge and give one Freudian idea that endure…

Leads to Friedrich Nietzsche.

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