On the Limits of Interpretation

One of the most pointed critiques of psychoanalysis came from the philosopher Karl Popper, writing in Conjectures and Refutations (1963). Popper noticed that the admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler were all impressed by what seemed like enormous explanatory power, by the sense that these theories could account for practically everything within their field. When he came across the psychoanalysts’ work, he found it resembled “astrology rather than astronomy” (Popper, 1963). Studying these theories, he wrote, had the effect of an “intellectual conversion or revelation”: once your eyes were opened, you saw confirming instances everywhere, and the world seemed full of verifications. Anyone who failed to see what you saw was either blinded by class interest or suffering from repressions that had not yet been analysed (Popper, 1963).

This is very different from the approach of the scientists Popper approved of. Einstein, for instance, had said in advance what would falsify his theory. Einstein’s theory predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend starlight by a precise amount, and during a solar eclipse in 1919 astronomers checked the sky and found the bend was there; had the light not moved as predicted, the theory would have been refuted. His main point was that Freud had built a theory that could not really be tested. A theory is meaningful, Popper argued, only if it tells you what would prove it wrong. Freud’s theory, on Popper’s account, cannot be falsified, and rules nothing out. For any behaviour a patient might present, and for its opposite just as readily, an interpretation is already waiting, so nothing the patient does could ever count against the theory. A theory that sets out to explain everything ends up, on Popper’s view, explaining nothing.

Popper illustrated the point with a personal anecdote. He had once reported a case to Adler, one that did not seem to him particularly Adlerian, but Adler analysed it without difficulty and without having met the child, basing it all on what he called his “thousandfold experience.” It seemed to Popper that each case had been interpreted in the light of previous experience and at the same time counted as additional confirmation of it. Popper is sharp and sarcastic in his critique, but also fair. He wrote:

“Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour” (Popper, 1963).

Say you come in and say you feel sad about a friend who has pulled away. The therapist wonders aloud whether the sadness is covering anger, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder. You consider it and say no, you really are sad, you know the difference. A good therapist holds the anger reading as one possibility among others. The difficulty comes only if the reading has already settled into certainty. Then your no can be heard as confirmation: of course you cannot feel the anger yet, the anger is what has been pushed away. You say again that you are genuinely not pushing anything down, and that too can be taken as evidence of resistance.

“While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”
― Karl R. Popper

 

Popper’s critique is not perfect, but it highlights a potential flaw in traditional therapy and may be particularly relevant to the neurodivergent population. Many neurodivergent clients describe going to therapy only to have their reactions read by therapists who are trained, have good hearts, and are working faithfully within a respected tradition, as some kind of defence or resistance.

Most psychological theories were built on data drawn from people who are, broadly speaking, neurotypical, yet in practice, they are applied to everyone as though the fit were guaranteed. Freud’s theory of resistance, Adler’s framework of compensation for inferiority, and Klein’s account of splitting and projection were developed in clinical settings that did not include autistic or ADHD adults as a recognised population, and the field has not gone back to revisit them in light of what is now known about neurodevelopmental differences. A small body of research on therapeutic work with neurodivergent adults has begun to emerge, but it has not yet reached most training programmes.

The risk is sharpest when a client’s neurodivergence has not yet been identified, because then neither person in the room has the frame that would make accurate sense of what is being said. An autistic client who says they took their partner’s words literally and were genuinely confused is not being defensive, naive, or defiant; they might just be reporting something true about how their cognition works. An ADHD client who says they forgot the appointment because they forgot the appointment is telling their whole truth, but a therapist trained to listen for latent content may reread that as avoidance. The line attributed to Freud, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, was a concession by the psychoanalytic circles themselves that not every detail carries a buried meaning.

Many neurodivergent adults have spent their lives being doubted by people who assumed there must be something else going on, because what they said did not match what was expected of them. When that doubt is met again, this time carrying the authority of expertise that may or may not be justified, it can land as double injury.

A person’s own reading of themselves is not a hard fact either. Psychological and philosophical research on self-knowledge suggests that people routinely construct explanations for their own behaviour that feel accurate but may have little to do with the actual causes of what they did (Cassam, 2014). People misjudge their own motives, soothe themselves with flattering accounts, and sometimes genuinely do not know why they did what they did. So the lesson is not that the client is always right and the therapist is always overreaching. But it is worth remembering that neither chair holds a certified truth.

A good professional must be able to hear past what a client says, because people do not always know themselves, and insight is often what they came for. But that has to be balanced by epistemic humility, by a willingness to hold one’s own reading as a guess that might be wrong. Where exactly that line falls, between pressing a useful challenge and epistemically overreaching, is not something any theory can settle in advance. It depends on the particular person, the particular moment, and the particular thing being said.

Popper was not entirely right. Human work is not a hard science and should not be held to the standard of one. Popper himself conceded as much. He wrote that he did “not doubt that much of what they say is of considerable importance, and may well play its part one day in a psychological science which is testable” (Popper, 1963).

Psychoanalysis is more of a hermeneutic practice, which is to say a practice of interpretation, of reading meaning in what a person says and does. We do not ask of an interpretation whether it has been falsified; what matters is whether the client can use it to their benefit and growth. An insight that helps a person has done its work. But still, Popper’s caution is worth keeping close. An interpretation that cannot be falsified should be treated as what it is: a theory, an unproven idea, a possibility.

In practice, a professional can offer a reading and mean it as an offer. A client can take a challenge seriously and still keep hold of their own sense of what is true, while staying open to the chance that the challenge has caught something they had missed. Perhaps the most useful thing a helping relationship can give a person is not a single correct interpretation of themselves. It is the confidence to weigh an interpretation, to keep what fits, and to set down what does not.