Patricia McCarthy – Evidence-Based Practice And Psychoanalysis: Thought Disorder and the Dream
 
Issue 46 (Spring 2011)  Pages – 57-71
 
Post-modernism, quantum theory, psychoanalysis-buzz words of the twentieth century likely to be misunderstood by the non-specialist – are domains that are governed by abstract sets of laws whose effect cannot be predicted and, into which, participants have to make their way. To acknowledge such domains is to broaden the definition of science and perhaps allow for a better understanding of one of them – psychoanalysis, which is governed by the laws of the unconscious. Freud discovered these laws, Lacan formalised them. How they work is the ‘evidence base’ of psychoanalysis which uniquely serves subjectivity and thereby excludes the objectifying eye of measurement. My argument is that to ignore this ‘evidence base’ is a loss to psychiatry and psychiatry’s patient – especially the psychotic. The implications of this loss will be further discussed by examining the parallels between thought disorder and the process at work in forming that simple ‘given’ of our psychical lives – the dream, continuous as it is with waking thought.