Psychodynamic Inquiry is Verifiable

Review of William R. Meyers, Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), ISBN 97837524898, 272 pages, hard

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cover, $95.00 (on amazon.com); an e-book version is also available.

The charges that psychoanalysis cannot be subject to the rigors of empirical observation, intensive scientific investigation, or that they are “unfalsifiable” (Karl Popper’s critique), have been repeated so often that many analysts themselves have assumed them to be true without further examination. William R. Meyers, former faculty member at Harvard and M.I.T., Research Director of the Peace Corps, and Professor Emeritus of the University of Cincinnati clearly demonstrates that these charges are unfounded in his book Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene (2015).

Meyers has produced a book about research methodologies that is quite readable and thoroughly enjoyable. In other words, one does not have to be a techno-research nerd like me to appreciate this book. Unlike a host of books about research that are dry, obtuse, indecipherable, and frequently off-putting, Meyers’ style and content have contributed to a book that is both comprehensible and relevant to understanding internal mental life and current world events. Instead of operating in an abstract conceptual vacuum of an ivory tower laboratory distant from the down-to-earth muck and grime of everyday life, he shows how scientific methodologies may be applied to and test for some of the grimmer, more primitive, and irrational (thus unconscious) aspects of reality.

He cites the rampant worldwide irrational violence seen in the Balkans, the Middle East, Darfur, Sudan, and Myanmar and explains how psychodynamic scientific methodologies may be employed to understand ISIS, Boko Haram, the murders at Charlie Hebdo, and the Hyper Cacher Kosher Supermarket as well as rape, child abuse, and so on. Meyers points out that these are irrational acts emanating from the unconscious and explains that we cannot understand these and other behaviors until we closely scrutinize their relation to the unconscious. He describes how to go about doing that by asking empirical questions and subjecting them to systematic investigations. Meyers is not satisfied that rational explanations involving stimulus-response, economic utility maximization, or cognitive psychological concepts like framing, integrative complexity, decision theory, or role analysis, etc., are deep enough or sufficiently robust to explain mental processes, suffused with ideation that extends beyond the scope of conscious awareness.

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At the same time, Meyers cautions the reader to recognize that, much like psychoanalytic treatment itself, undertaking an in-depth, systematic empirical examination of the unconscious is not for the faint of heart. This may be because scrutiny of the unconscious requires the ability to hold opposites in mind simultaneously. Thus, like dream interpretation—what you see on the surface (the manifest content)—may not be what you get, with respect to underlying meanings (the latent content). In other words, motivations for certain behaviors are associated with unconscious fantasies that precede irrational behaviors. In the unconscious, opposites lie side by side in equivalence. Time does not exist. It is only in the present. Thinking does not directly correspond to logic. Instead, it is magical, sometimes concrete, or even syncretistic, and practically always idiosyncratic.

These factors would make an ordinary researcher’s life miserable. However, Meyers is no run-of-the-mill apparatchik who simply abides by the so-called tried and true, although he also knows those methods quite well. He adds several new dimensions to his level of inquiry and has developed ways to explore them. In keeping with this, he is intrepid in his choice of subject material and methods of research. He challenges us to recognize that we do not want to acknowledge the “too-close-to-home” existence of irrationality filled with its primitive impulses, urges, monstrous fantasies, burning desires, lustful ideation, or destructive images. He is unafraid to assume the role of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, who “dared to go where no man has gone before.” For example, he examines human trafficking and asks questions about the subsidizers (i.e. customers) of this deplorable industry.

Dr. Meyers confronts the issues of falsifiability, testability, and disconfirmability as well as providing social science methods and techniques to address these concerns in order to establish whether a set of assertions or a particular theory is valid or not. At the same time, his claims are not without modesty. He makes no presumption that his methods are the be-all end-all or that they can be applied to every case. He describes their limitations and when they are appropriate and when they are not, stipulating that his techniques are “not all-powerful.” He even points out that subjectivity and objectivity are not necessarily mutually exclusive and that the very act of looking at certain datum, as opposed to a different set of data, is based on subjectivity (even though the data may have an objective base). These are not distinctions without much of a dif-

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ference; they are important differentiations. Yet, as he says, “where the differences in interpretation [of the data] are mutually contradictory, a good answer is to expose the assertions resulting from each study to disconfirmation.”

In addition, Meyers addresses the reflexivity of the researcher as affected by the transference-countertransference phenomena. Not only does the very act of looking at something transform what is being observed, but the observer (researcher) too is impacted by what is gleaned. He describes reductionism and notes that his methods purposely avoid it for several reasons, among them the complex and irreducible nature of confluent factors that often go into behavior. He even makes a compelling case for the legitimacy of studies involving an N of 1 trial (a single subject clinical trial).

For those of you who wish to use this book as a bedtime soporific in order to overcome insomnia, this is not the book for you, deep and heady as it may be. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it was stimulating enough for me to recommend to anyone who prefers to ask questions a la the method of inquiry over the method of authority in which the king, organized religion, or the government dictate what constitutes the truth.

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