Studies don’t support death drive—replicable tests are impossible, variables are too vague to operationalize

The problem is that psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., "super-ego," "Oedipus complex," and "death drive"30 ), unlike them of say physics ("electron," [End Page 67] "muon," and "quark"), are logical constructs that have not been corroborated by precise observations and replicable tests. Hence Freud's logical constructs as proto-concepts are not even adequate as working hypotheses. As early as 1934, J. F. Brown, who claimed he was in sympathy with Freud's new science, urged, "But, and here almost all critics of psychoanalysis are in agreement, the theory has never been precise enough to allow formulation of working hypotheses for which adequate experimental situations could be found" (1933, p. 333). He went on to acknowledge, perhaps somewhat prophetically, given the amount of attention Freud gets today in philosophy of mind, "Freud's discoveries probably are the most striking and original contributions made to the science of mind in our time." He added, in a manner that vitiates the compliment, that Freud is more prophet than scientist—more Bruno than Galileo (1933, p. 226).

Freud was aware of that. His own view of the concepts of psychoanalysis is ambivalent. At times, he shows impatience and becomes intolerant of his critics. "Only in psychology [is obscurity not tolerated]; here the constitutional incapacity of men for scientific research comes into full view. It looks as though people did not expect from psychology progress in knowledge, but some other kind of satisfaction; every unsolved problem, every acknowledged uncertainty is turned into a ground of complaint against it" (1916–7, S.E., XXII: 6). At other times, Freud seems to agree with his critics. In "Autobiographical Study," when he mentions difficulties with "compulsion to repeat," he adds:

Although it arose from a desire to fix some of the most important theoretical ideas of psycho-analysis, it goes far beyond psychoanalysis. I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of drive in psychoanalysis.

(1925, S.E., XX: 57)

In "Why War?," Freud writes to Einstein in a manner to explain his ambivalence: "It may perhaps seem to you [Einstein] as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this?" (1933, S.E., XXII: 211)

In sum, the bedrock concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis are conceptually indeterminate. That means that the fundamental principles of Freudian psychoanalysis are conceptually indeterminate and, thus, obscure or meaningless. Unfortunately, as we have seen, Freud was evasive when it [End Page 68] came to the question of the status of the bedrock concepts of psychoanalysis and even said that psychoanalysis, with the exception of "repression" and "unconscious," could do just as well without them31 (1914, S.E., XIV: 16; 1925, S.E., XX: 32–3). Without referents to the concepts he employs so significantly, Freud is writing gobbledygook.

A related difficulty is conceptual change. Freud, as a scientist, was committed to conceptual flexibility, insofar as his postulates were avowedly data-driven. Nonetheless, many of the conceptual changes he made—e.g., his rejection of his Seduction theory and his adoption of the death drive and structural model—were prompted more by theoretical difficulties than they were driven by observational data. In addition, Freud surrounded himself with lackeys, albeit intelligent lackeys, that allowed him, as founder of psychoanalysis, the privilege of being final arbiter on issues of conceptual change within psychoanalysis.32