Response to Jerome Wakefield's "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""

Abstract

Although in his article Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's Intrapsychic Humanism (Social Service Review 67 [March 1993]: 127-55) Jerome Wakefield criticizes the authors of intrapsychic humanism for producing what he calls a one-motive theory of human development and psychopathology, he has produced a one-theory critique that, because it does not recognize or address the uniqueness of intrapsychic humanism's central tenets, does not apply to intrapsychic humanism. Postpositivist researchers recognize that the articulation of ontological and epistemological assumptions is the hallmark of a scientific explanation and is one way to distinguish scientific theories from magical thinking.' Wakefield claims that intrapsychic humanism lacks evidence, but, in fact, he ignores one of the most important criteria for a sound scientific explanation from within a postpositivist paradigm, which is addressed in intrapsychic humanism: the validity and consistency of the ontological and epistemological assumptions. Furthermore, according to the ontic model of scientific explanation advanced by the well-respected postpositivist philosopher of science Wesley Salmon, an explanation has scientific merit: 1) when we obtain knowledge of the hidden mechanisms, causal or other, that produce the phenomena we seek to explain, 2) when our knowledge of the world is so organized that we can comprehend what we know under a smaller number of assumptions than previously, and 3) when we supply missing bits of descriptive knowledge that answer why-questions and remove us from particular sorts of intellectual predicaments.2 Intrapsychic humanism manifestly meets Salmon's criteria for scientific explanations. In summary, it offers a new explanation for the cause of our subjective experience of personal existence; it is a unified and coherent explanation for many aspects of human development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process that have been unexplained previously; and it is the first psychology and philosophy of mind that offers a nontheological solution for the significant intellectual predicament of the solipsism of interpersonal consciousness, which has remained unsolved since Descartes posed it so clearly over 300 years ago.3 A theory that advances a new understanding of human consciousness of necessity requires new terms to explain those experiences; any genuinely new scientific theory always requires that language be given new meanings in order to refer to the new discoveries. Examples include Einstein's principle of simultaneity and the terms quarks and string that have accompanied new theories in physics.4 Wakefield dismisses as jargon the terminology that is necessary to refer to the new discoveries about human development,