A Singular View on Psychoanalysis as a Science from James Strachey, London, 1939-43

Abstract

In the mid-Twentieth Century the psychoanalyst James Strachey attempted an intervention during a crisis within British psychoanalysis which demonstrated that he had some acquaintance with philosophy and the philosophy and history of science. In effect, he sought to address some difficulties that were emerging from psychoanalysis's firm identification with the natural sciences by resorting to these other disciplines. Strachey's sources will be examined including his contact with the University of Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Frank Ramsey. The case will be made that Strachey had been prescient in comparing the difficulties occurring in the 1940s in the regular Scientific Meetings of his analytical Society to the incidents of superseded theories that were predicted by some philosophers and recorded by historians of science.