Psychoanalytic Psychology 14:337–346.

While philosophers have worried about whether psychoanalysis is really a science, psychoanalysts have practiced it as a discipline and questioned aspects of its technique, its theoretical underpinnings, and its therapeutic goals. We have worried about the scientific status of our discipline in a way that other clinicians do not find necessary. Clinicians in other fields are content to have a clinical science, one that explains the regularities found in clinical practice and allows prediction of what specific interventions will accomplish therapeutically. As a clinical theory, psychoanalysis could be on a par with other clinical 609 at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016apa.sagepub.comDownloaded from sciences. But psychoanalysis does not limit itself (the way, for example, radiology or dentistry does), to the study of a particular physical domain. Because we are dealing with the mind and not the brain, and because we are inextricably entangled in questions that phi