Psicanálise, cientificidade e cultura: cenas atuais de um debate interminável

Abstract

The scientific status of psychoanalysis has been a subject of debate since its inception, beginning with Sigmund Freud himself. Scientific demarcation is a central topic in the field of epistemology, aiming to establish reliable criteria to distinguish scientific knowledge from non scientific knowledge. This thesis which adopts a descriptive, exploratory, and analytical approach, aimed to discuss current scenes of this debate, enriching it with readings that include a sociocultural perspective on what constitutes valid knowledge. The book That’s Nonsense! Pseudosciences and Other Topics That Don't Deserve to Be Taken Seriously by Natália Pasternak and Carlos Orsi, published in 2023, served as a starting point and a contemporary reference for several points developed in this thesis. In their work, the authors revisit the label of pseudoscience attributed to psychoanalysis by Karl Popper in the 1950s. Our objective was to present the main arguments put forth by Pasternak and Orsi, and subsequently, to expose the positions of psychoanalysts in response to some of the points raised by the critics. On one hand, we sought to present evidence supporting the validity of psychoanalysis as a form of counter argumentation; on the other hand, it became necessary to problematize the model of science adopted by the authors, which functions as a "gold standard" of scientificity. Within this model, the notion of the brainhood, understood as a successful scientific and cultural representation of the neurosciences in contemporary times, was analyzed, and some of its sociocultural implications were discussed. Finally, we investigated how Freudian psychoanalysis fits into the dichotomy between the natural and human sciences, the socio-historical factors that led Freud to classify his creation as a natural science, and how the operational structure of psychoanalysis still grants it a singular position within the field of scientific knowledge.