Psychoanalysis: Closing the Popperian Gap

Abstract Since Karl Popper’s critique, psychoanalysis has been dismissed as a “pseudo-science,” incapable of producing falsifiable hypotheses. This paper argues that the impasse can be resolved not by redefining psychoanalysis as symbolic hermeneutics, but by analyzing its classical schools: Freud, Jung, and Lacan, as distinct practical expressions governed by shared structural laws of discourse. Using formal analysis of canonical texts and cases (Dora, Little Hans, Miss Miller, and Lacan’s theoretical corpus), the study operationalizes psychoanalytic writing through the Universal Grammar of Inversion (UGI), a model that identifies four symbolic phases: Rise, Inversion, Permanence, and Meta and five falsifiable hypotheses (H1–H5) about their distribution and interaction. The results show that key structural mechanisms like Authority Surplus and EPI-Closure cut across schools and are constrained by genre rather than doctrine: narrative cases obey different scaling laws than theoretical texts, while Structural Cohesion (H5) introduces a measurable spectrum of rhetorical rigidity. By demonstrating reproducible, falsifiable regularities within psychoanalytic discourse, the paper establishes the methodological foundation for a comparative science of symbolic structure: empirical, testable, and open to disconfirmation, without departing from the clinical and theoretical corpus of psychoanalysis.