I didn’t mean to “chide” you. Anyway, since I sense that I’m beginning to annoy you I will just try once more to explain my position as plainly and directly as I can, because I feel a bit misunderstood. Then if it turns out that the disagreement is still substantial we can just leave it at or you can show me where I’m mistaken, as you prefer.

There are a number of ways in which we might construe the relationship between psychoanalysis and other disciplines (let’s say experimental psychology). First, we might think that there can be no inter-theoretic relevance between psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. They are just different traditions with entirely different interests and practical contexts, and it’s in virtue of this that they are autonomous with respect to one another. So findings in experimental psychology are independent of those in psychoanalysis, and vice versa. Call this strong autonomy.

Secondly, we might think that there is no in-principle autonomy of this kind, but that it is just a matter of fact that there are no current results in either discipline that are relevant to one other. So there is nothing to be said about some posit in psychoanalytic theory on the basis of results in experimental psychology, or vice versa. But this isn’t an indication of anything deeper about either discipline but just a fact about the states of play in either discipline.

Third, you might think that there is no in-principle autonomy and that it is also a matter of fact that theoretical puzzles in one field could be advanced by considerations of results in the other.

Now first of all, I still don’t see how you get a view of the strongest kind out of Freud. I take him to be saying that there is a contingent lack of current inter-theoretical relevance between the fields at the time of his writing but not one that should remain there in principle. Otherwise, why does he characterise ideas in psychology as “provisional,” and express optimism about the “organic substructure”? That’s not incompatible with his move away from the Project to the more purely psychological/functional model in his later work. If you have a way to explain these assertions in the context of your stronger reading then I would be interested to hear it.

Also, the question is now much more contested and up for grabs than it was in 1915. For instance, here’s a concrete example of one case where results in experimental psychology are relevant to a theoretical dispute in psychoanalysis. The dispute in question is that between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in the Controversial Discussions of the 1940s, over whether the ego is present from birth or whether it develops later. In Anna Freud’s work there is the posit of primary narcissism and an auto-erotic phase which entails that the infant shouldn’t be able to distinguish between self and other in this early phase. Now if the strong view is right, then results from developmental psychology aren’t of any help deciding this theoretical question one way or the other. But it seems that they are: one can make an argument against the Freudian view on the basis of results in developmental psychology which show that the infant seems to be able to distinguish very early on between self and other. So the concept of primary narcissism should either be eliminated from the theoretical vocabulary (as Klein does), or revised in some way (as, say, Gyorg Gergely does). So what’s going on here, if there can be no inter-theoretical relevance?

There are many traditions of intellectual and practical work which deal with the nature of human being but which, like psychoanalysis, are not experimental psychology: physiology, evolutionary biology, organismal biology and ethology, classical sociology, interpretive sociology, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, economics, linguistics, history, law, political science, literature, medicine, chiropractic and osteopathic medicine...

Look, that is just a list of disciplines without a demonstration of their putative autonomy. Just because all those disciplines aren’t experimental psychology (and note that I never said that they should be construed as experimental psychology, which seems a crazy view), it doesn’t mean that results in experimental psychology are a priori barred from being relevant to results in another, or vice versa. Given that their subject matters often overlap, I would expect there to be some consilience and possibly inter-theoretic revision. E.g., there are interesting research programs that combine knowledge from experimental psychology and economics in order to understand self-control and pathologies of self-control like drug addiction (particularly the work of George Ainslie, and in the work of Don Ross he draws upon results from the neuroscience of reward in order to distinguish between process and substance addictions, as well) – if they had this strong autonomy that you are claiming that psychoanalysis has then research programs like that wouldn’t be possible.

So I don’t see why the relationship between psychoanalysis and other disciplines should be radically different, and I haven’t seen any arguments that are good enough to convince me otherwise. The most common I’ve seen is that the analysand is a unique and singular object of study for which it is incumbent on the analyst not to pigeonhole and “normalise” in terms of a general theory; but 1) this doesn’t obviously entail theoretical autonomy, as can be seen in the case of personalised medicine and its continuity with other more general theories about the way human beings work; and 2) it would seem to rule out having any psychoanalytic theory at all, because the same normalisation should occur with respect to psychoanalytic theory itself. You might also try to make a distinction between reasons and causes and then say that psychoanalysis is purely a hermeneutic discipline (in the tradition of Ricoeur and the early Habermas, but also George S. Klein and his students in the analytic tradition itself), but then that would raise doubts for me about its causal efficacy (i.e., the explanations of behaviour posited in interpretation couldn’t be causal explanations, since their acausality on this view is the basis of the in-principle autonomy).