Causation vs. causal explanation: a response to Axmacher

In his paper, “Causation in psychoanalysis,” Dr Nikolai Axmacher raises and responds to three arguments that claim that psychoanalytic explanations and causal explanations in the neurological sciences are mutually inconsistent. These arguments, he claims, are raised by many opponents of neuropsychoanalysis, who argue that psychoanalytic explanations, because they are hermeneutic in character, cannot be consistent with causal explanations in the sciences. Axmacher disputes these arguments, and attempts to show that the apparent differences between hermeneutical and causal explanations are merely apparent; he thereby hopes to defend “the neuropsychoanalytic endeavor” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 3). I examine Axmacher’s responses to the three arguments he raises; I shall argue that two of them are indeed insufficient to raise concerns about the neuropsychoanalytic project, but one of the arguments— Argument Two—does raise concerns that Axmacher’s responses do not consider. Axmacher hopes to show that causal and hermeneutic explanations are, at least in principle, consistent with each other by showing that hermeneutic psychoanalytic explanations also appeal to causal principles. I argue that even if the latter claim is true, fundamental differences between psychoanalytic explanations, and scientific causal explanations, remain. At the heart of the inconsistency between psychoanalysis and neuroscience is, claims Axmacher, a difference in kinds of explanation: psychoanalysis relies on hermeneutic explanations, which “are epistemologically problematic because they typically act in a retroactive manner . . . but do not make predictions” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 1), while neuroscience appeals to causal explanations that both explain and predict on the basis of scientific laws. Axmacher examines three specific arguments that “suggest that hermeneutic reconstructions are fundamentally inconsistent with causal explanations” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 2) in the hopes of refuting them. Argument One—the “Freedom and Causality” argument—is based on Habermas’s understanding of the nature of psychotherapeutic work in lifting repression. Habermas conceptualizes repression in the unconscious in terms of causal processes, which are “suppressive” and “dominating,” whereas psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic process that is “conceptualized as a communicative process governed by the idea of the ‘unforced force of the better argument’” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 2). Argument Two claims that “causal explanations state an inevitable and lawful relationship between cause and effect” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 2), while “hermeneutic explanations rely on deferred reconstructions” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 2). What is meant by “deferred reconstructions” is not spelled out, but I take it to mean that hermeneutic explanations do not refer to deterministic causal laws. Argument Three claims that the relationship between a cause and its effect in empirical observations needs to be discovered and is falsifiable, while hermeneutic-type explanations, which are typically given in the first-person, are both unsurprising and unfalsifiable, and hence not causal. I first examine Axmacher’s responses to arguments One and Three, leaving discussion about Argument Two for later. Against Argument One, Axmacher rightly raises a concern that Habermas’s account of repression—which Habermas describes as being governed by causal laws characteristic of the natural sciences—is inconsistent with his understanding of the hermeneutic nature of psychoanalysis more broadly. Axmacher objects that “it remains unclear how the therapeutic transition from causal laws to hermeneutic relationships should occur” (Axmacher, 2013, p. 2). This seems an appropriate objection to Habermas, whose understanding of repression conflicts with the way that many psychoanalysts understand it. Freud, for example, writes about repression in psychological terms: “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” [Freud, 1985 (1915), p. 147, italics in original]. This description is clearly not a complete analysis of the nature of repression, but there can be no doubt that Freud, despite being a materialist, explains repression in psychological, not scientific, terms. I thus agree with Axmacher’s concerns regarding Habermas’s characterization of the nature of repression. Axmacher’s response to the Argument Three—that psychoanalytic explanations are unfalsifiable and different in kind from scientific explanations—is to deny the transparency and unfalsifiablity of psychological explanation.