Subjectivity in psychoanalytic inference: the nagging persistence of Wilhelm Fliess's Achensee question

A century since the beginnings of psychoanalysis we still do not know whether Freud's conjectures are correct. The difficulty is not one of fuzzy meanings or substantive implausibility, but of proof. Inferences one makes in a psychoanalytic session are corroborated by how the material coheres, converges upon an inferred psychism underlying the behavior. The problem is evidentiary and specifically statistic, since not everything fits (as in Freud's jigsaw puzzle analogy). Accuracy of short-term predictions is a semi-objective test of validity, and some other checks on theme-tracing are suggested.

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