The Heuristic Value of Freud

Abstract

Wolman approaches the examination of psychoanalysis as a scientific theory by a brief course in philosophy of science. He demonstrates his noted skill at attacking problems in a careful, scholarly, step-by-step process. His enormous breadth of scholarship, which extends far beyond psychoanalysis and psychology, is excellently used in the present paper. By defining the philosophical ground rule of evaluating Freudian theory on the basis of epistemological realism, he negates much of the objection of the demand of logical positivism that the description must entail directly observable phenomena.