Freud and the idea of a pseudoscience

Abstract

In this essay which comprises one of chapters in Frank Cioffi Freud and the Question of a Pseudoscience (Open Court, Chicago 1998, pp. 115-142) its author, the most harsh and provocative contemporary critic of psychoanalysis, has assembled reasons for concluding that psychoanalysis  is a pseudoscience. What makes this text unique among current offerings is the contrary view about a pseudoscience according to which it is constituted by methodologically defective procedures (in a sense of wilful which encompasses refined self-deception) rather than merely by formally defective theses.