section_path: Legacy/Science
section_name: Science
paragraph_text: Science
  
  Research projects designed to test Freud's theories empirically have led to a vast literature on the topic. American psychologists began to attempt to study repression in the experimental laboratory around 1930. In 1934, when the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig sent Freud reprints of his attempts to study repression, Freud responded with a dismissive letter stating that "the wealth of reliable observations" on which psychoanalytic assertions were based made them "independent of experimental verification." Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg concluded in 1977 that some of Freud's concepts were supported by empirical evidence. Their analysis of research literature supported Freud's concepts of oral and anal personality constellations, his account of the role of Oedipal factors in certain aspects of male personality functioning, his formulations about the relatively greater concern about the loss of love in women's as compared to men's personality economy, and his views about the instigating effects of homosexual anxieties on the formation of paranoid delusions. They also found limited and equivocal support for Freud's theories about the development of homosexuality. They found that several of Freud's other theories, including his portrayal of dreams as primarily containers of secret, unconscious wishes, as well as some of his views about the psychodynamics of women, were either not supported or contradicted by research. Reviewing the issues again in 1996, they concluded that much experimental data relevant to Freud's work exists, and supports some of his major ideas and theories.
  
  Other viewpoints include those of psychologist and science historian Malcolm Macmillan, who concludes in Freud Evaluated (1991) that "Freud's method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes". Morris Eagle states that it has been "demonstrated quite conclusively that because of the epistemologically contaminated status of clinical data derived from the clinical situation, such data have questionable probative value in the testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses". Richard Webster, in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), described psychoanalysis as "perhaps the most complex and successful" pseudoscience in history. Crews believes that psychoanalysis has no scientific or therapeutic merit. University of Chicago research associate Kurt Jacobsen takes these critics to task for their own supposedly dogmatic and historically naive views both about psychoanalysis and the nature of science.
  
  I.B. Cohen regards Freud's Interpretation of Dreams as a revolutionary work of science, the last such work to be published in book form. In contrast Allan Hobson believes that Freud, by rhetorically discrediting 19th century investigators of dreams such as Alfred Maury and the Marquis de Hervey de Saint-Denis at a time when study of the physiology of the brain was only beginning, interrupted the development of scientific dream theory for half a century. The dream researcher G. William Domhoff has disputed claims of Freudian dream theory being validated.
  
  Karl Popper claimed that Freud's Psychoanalytic Theories were presented in unfalsifiable form, meaning that no experiment could ever disprove them. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum argues in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984) that Popper was mistaken and that many of Freud's theories are empirically testable, a position with which others such as Eysenck agree. The philosopher Roger Scruton, writing in Sexual Desire (1986), also rejected Popper's arguments, pointing to the theory of repression as an example of a Freudian theory that does have testable consequences. Scruton nevertheless concluded that psychoanalysis is not genuinely scientific, because it involves an unacceptable dependence on metaphor. The philosopher Donald Levy agrees with Grünbaum that Freud's theories are falsifiable but disputes Grünbaum's contention that therapeutic success is only the empirical basis on which they stand or fall, arguing that a much wider range of empirical evidence can be adduced via clinical case material.
  
  In a study of psychoanalysis in the United States, Nathan Hale reported on the "decline of psychoanalysis in psychiatry" during 1965–1985. The continuation of this trend was noted by Alan Stone: "As academic psychology becomes more 'scientific' and psychiatry more biological, psychoanalysis is being brushed aside." Paul Stepansky, while noting that psychoanalysis remains influential in the humanities, records the "vanishingly small number of psychiatric residents who choose to pursue psychoanalytic training" and the "nonanalytic backgrounds of psychiatric chairpersons at major universities" among the evidence he cites for his conclusion that "Such historical trends attest to the marginalisation of psychoanalysis within American psychiatry." Nonetheless, Freud was ranked as the third most cited psychologist of the 20th century. It is also claimed that in moving beyond the "orthodoxy of the not so distant past... new ideas and new research has led to an intense reawakening of interest in psychoanalysis from neighbouring disciplines ranging from the humanities to neuroscience and including the non-analytic therapies".
  
  Research in the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis, founded by neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms, has proved controversial with some psychoanalysts criticising the very concept itself. Solms and his colleagues have argued for neuro-scientific findings being "broadly consistent" with Freudian theories pointing out brain structures relating to Freudian concepts such as libido, drives, the unconscious, and repression. Neuroscientists who have endorsed Freud's work include David Eagleman who believes that Freud "transformed psychiatry" by providing "the first exploration of the way in which hidden states of the brain participate in driving thought and behavior" and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel who argues that "psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind."