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Psychoanalysis: Theories or Stories? — Morris Perlman

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What distinguishes a scientific explanation from a compelling story—and what does that distinction mean in the consulting room?

 

In this questioning, often witty paper, Morris Perlman explores the relationship between psychoanalytic theory, interpretation and therapeutic change.

 

Returning to Freud’s own arguments and drawing examples from science and literature, he asks what a patient’s acceptance of an interpretation can tell us, and why different schools of psychoanalysis might each achieve success.

 

For anyone interested in how therapy works, this paper offers an invitation to reconsider familiar assumptions about truth, meaning and the explanations through which we understand ourselves.

 

Read the full paper to follow Perlman’s argument.

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