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Freud's ‘Tally’ Argument, Placebo Control Treatments, and the Evaluation of Psychotherapy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

John D. Greenwood
John D. Greenwood*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, City University of New York
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Abstract

In this paper it is suggested that Freud's ‘tally argument’ (Grünbaum 1984) is not best interpreted as a risky claim concerning the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy, but as a risky claim concerning the implications of theoretical psychoanalytic explanations of the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy. Despite the fact that Freud never empirically established that these implications hold, the ‘tally argument’ does draw attention to a critical distinction that is too often neglected in contemporary empirical studies of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy: between empirical evaluations of the efficacy of psychotherapy and empirical evaluations of theoretical explanations of the efficacy of psychotherapy, and the different forms of comparative enquiry relevant to each. It is argued that the contemporary neglect of this critical distinction, in conjunction with the common negative conception of placebo control treatments in psychotherapy research, has led to the epistemic impoverishment of experimental studies of the various professional psychotherapies. In consequence, although there is good empirical evidence for the efficacy of psychoanalysis and other forms of professional psychotherapy, there is no good empirical evidence for theoretical psychoanalytic explanations of the efficacy of psychoanalysis, or for traditional theoretical explanations of the efficacy of other forms of professional psychotherapy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 605 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to Larry Laudan and the other participants in the 1995 NEH Summer Seminar on ‘The Concept of Evidence’ at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who contributed significantly to the development of the argument of this paper.

‡

Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, CUNY, 138th Street and Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031.

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