2 - A Fun Night Out: Horror and Other Pleasures of the Cinema

Summary

Psychoanalytic theories of film, and of the horror film in particular, have been subject to attack from various quarters. This essay responds to these attacks, defending a psychoanalytic approach to horror cinema from objections raised by theorists such as Stephen Prince, Andrew Tudor, Jonathan Crane, Noël Carroll, and Berys Gaut. Some of these objections do little more than wheel out the familiar charge – a common one even in Freud's time – that psychoanalysis is “unscientific.” But even if it is true that psychoanalysis is unscientific (by some often objectionable standard), this does not ipso facto show that it is false. Adolf Grünbaum's critique of Freud's so-called Tally Argument (see below) is an example of one such “objectionable standard.” This critique is basically a gussied-up version of the claim that psychoanalysis is not falsifiable. However, the falsifiability (in principle) of a scientific theory has to be interpreted in a way suitable to the theory in question. It is clear that psychoanalysis is not going to be falsifiable (in principle) in the way that the physical or biological sciences are – that is, by producing an experiment that can conclusively falsify it. Nevertheless, as I will argue, aspects of psychoanalysis certainly are falsifiable, and indeed have been falsified.

It is also not difficult to produce examples of disciplines and theories that are (by certain standards) unscientific but true, or likely to be true.