Psychoanalysis and the scientific mind: Robert Boyle

Abstract

It is a tempting exercise, both historically and psychoanalytically, to contribute to a psychoanalytic understanding of Robert Boyle. Over many years, historians of science have been amassing evidence of science as a social activity, part of the culture of its time. As these studies progress, they stumble into psychoanalytic territory willy nilly. Indeed, the very notion of enquiry into nature becomes a psychoanalytic issue, as soon as we think of it as an emotionally charged approach to an object. If we think of Boyle as an early modern scientific investigator and as a personification of the tensions surrounding the investigation of nature as an object in the psychoanalytic sense, then we have a double reason for bringing a psychoanalytic understanding to bear upon him.

One of the criticisms of a psychoanalytic enquiry into any historical figure or situation is that the object of study is not present in the way a patient is present. It is not simply that the patient is not there – after all, there is documentary evidence to stand in for the missing person – but that the key feature that makes the enquiry psychoanalytic is missing. There is no transference, and no way to monitor the accuracy of interpretations. That means that the analyst cannot sit in the place of the objects in which the subject has an intense emotional investment, and from which vantage the subject of these investments can be studied. In that sense, the enquiry cannot be said to be properly psychoanalytic in method.