Observability

Dedalus — 06/30/2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHBw8Izy_VY I felt this was relevant to our textbook discussion on observability in psychoanalysis  In psychoanalysis, the subject under study is the psyche (however it's variously defined). The outputs we can observe include actions, thoughts, feelings, dreams, slips of tongue (and neuroimaging scans?). What inputs, however, that cause or change states in the system aren't clear to me. I imagine they must include environment, but it occurs to me that the environment may include not just the external environment but an internal environment too, e.g., gastric fluctuations, genetic mutations, etc. It seems to me that psychoanalysts are scientific in so far as they can observe (and possibly measure) their subject. But, I haven't seen any evidence of psychoanalysts trying to control inputs to manipulate the system's states given their theory of how the psyche works (reconstructed from observation). I suppose, you could consider the clinical setting as a place where you could test whether a theory accurately reconstructs how the psyche works in so far as you can manipulate inputs like environment, but it seems like there are limits on this: you're limited from the kind of states you can change or create (i.e., no "negative" ones) as well as the kind of environmental inputs you can control for (you couldn't control for internal conditions or even external conditions beyond the clinical setting, so how would you know it was the application of your theory that changed the system state -- i.e., from bad to good -- rather than something outside the clinical setting).Discord(edited by author, spelling?)Y
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Objective
Ob-words