Wikipedia:Peer review/Psychoanalytic theory/archive1

Psychoanalytic theory

It'll take more than a clean-up tag to move this ball forward. This is more or less a complete re-write, rather than a touch-up, so I'm asking for broad feedback on further improvements. Buffyg 05:28, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Missed the requirement to add article to peer review list. Submitting in accordance with rules. Buffyg 14:57, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Suggestions for the peer-review

The article should not require a paragraph to describe what it is about; instead, its scope should simply be theories to do with psychoanalysis. It should include subsections on the question of whether (and how) psychoanalysis can be studied objectively, whether it is disproveable in whole or part (and whether this matters), the informal "theory" of the manners in which analysis can be conducted (e.g. bare room unlike Freud; methods of interpretation), and the relationships with behavioural, cognitive, and psychiatric (and perhaps even literary) theories. It would be interesting to have an explanation (theory) of why psychoanalysis has resisted decline so much more successfully in France than in anglophone countries. Rather than complicated sentences with complicated words, we should be treated to simple descriptions of the differences between Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian thinking. Possibly in lists if that helps to simplify the sentences.

The article does not require a paragraph to describe what it is about; it takes the opening paragraph to delineate its subject matter. I think the word objective is used above in an impoverished sense. One question that arises in psychoanalytic theory is what exactly one is saying when one claims that psychoanalysis is a science. If one is talking about eidectic proof, one is definitely not in the realm of falsifiability in Popper's sense.

We certainly need to talk more about the subject matter in some detail (the current article is mostly a sketch), but a comparison of Freud, Jung, and Adler can be made by reading those entries. Hypothesising on the relative strength of psychoanalysis in the French vs. anglophone contexts would be going rather far into the field of original research, which is what wikipedia is supposed not to be. Writing the article as a series of lists for the benefit of simpification is almost certainly doing so for the benefit of oversimplification. Buffyg 23:01, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your careful reply. I think we need to aim for readability by a wide audience, and this requires we use more common usages than "eidetic proof", which I for one don't understand. I agree that lists usually impose a simplistic way of thinking, but that to me is better than <<<"Major thinkers within psychoanalytic theory include Nicholas Abraham, Serge Leclaire, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, René Major, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques-Alain Miller; their work is anything but unitary — Derrida, for example, has remarked that virtually the entirety of Freud's metapsychology, while possessing some strategic value previously necessary to the elaboration of psychoanalysis, ought to be discarded at this point, whereas Miller is sometimes taken as heir apparent to Lacan because of his editorship of Lacan's seminars, his interest in analysis is even more philosophical than clinical, whereas Major has questioned the complicity of clinical psychoanalysis with various forms of totalitarian government.">>>

Thank you for accepting the possibility of extending the article's scope; we should probably start with a reworking of the first sentence, which seems to me to (a) define the article in terms of what it excludes, and (b) include a redundant clause.

I agree that links to Freud, Jung etc are important but this article could be a good place for comparing and contrasting them. The psychoanalysis article includes some good text on theory, and we should avoid duplication. This may require discussion with the authors of that (excellent) article.