Subjectivity and language (1st part) - A contribution to the comprehension of science in psychotherapy

Abstract

This article is an attempt to contribute to the discussion about the scientific basement of psychotherapy. At first there shall be made a differentiation to the empirical studies of effectiveness, which have become topical in connection with the legal standardization and the financing of psychotherapy by the social institutions in Austria. In contrary to the view of science as homogen, empirical science should be considered in a different way than natural science. Psychotherapy shall be considered as a non-nomological, hermeneutic empirical science, in which the procedure of scientific finding gets its legitimacy only from the dialogue between therapist and client and not from the examination of hypothesis based on facts or from the explanation of this facts by general scientific laws. Mainly with psychoanalysis and to some extent also with client-centered psychotherapy as main examples, the process of how psychotherapists come to their findings, how they verify them, and build a systematic theory upon them shall be shown. Beside to S. Freud and C. R. Rogers there will be especially referred to J. Habermas and A. Lorenzer, who made an essential contribution to the epistemological foundation of psychoanalysis and who tried to develop the interactionistic aspects, which are already included in the “biological” formulations of Freud’s metapsychology, and to extend them in the light of new theories of social interaction and of critical social sciences. Keywords Metascience, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, client-centered psychotherapy, metapsychology, action language.