THE SCIENTIFIC CRISIS OF FREUD’S PSYCHOANALYSIS IN RELATION TO KARL POPPER’S FALSIFIABILITY CRITERION

The setting of this thesis is Vienna in the first decades of the last century, a period marked by new revolutionary scientific discoveries – one honourable mention, serving as example, is Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity – but also a time of great improvement, as psychology, until then characterised by origins and similarities with philosophy, began to emerge as a distinct discipline, trying to adopt a more scientific methodology. While the first psychology laboratory in Germany had been active for decades, a famous name contributed to its rapid progress: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. In this context, Karl Popper, philosopher of science, played a role in one of the debates of the time, concerning science’s methods of investigation and conclusions; his main subject of study was the demarcation problem, which aimed to differentiate science from non-science. Thus, this thesis will focus on this specific research question: “Is Freud’s psychoanalysis a science, according to Karl Popper’s criteria of science?”, analysing Karl Popper’s principles and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The text is structured into three chapters, covering the following topics: introduction to the philosophical debates of the time and Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability; brief overview of the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, and Karl Popper’s epistemological critique of it; and lastly, a discussion on the modern renaissance of psychoanalysis.