This excerpt is from a paper: (The main theme is to reveal how Popper and his ilk, due to their own mental deficiencies, distorted their experience of psychoanalysis, thus fabricating the narrative of psychoanalysis as "untestable" and "refusing to be tested" under a distorted, paranoid, and pathological experience.)

This excerpt is from a paper: (The main theme is to reveal how Popper and his ilk, due to their own mental deficiencies, distorted their experience of psychoanalysis, thus fabricating the narrative of psychoanalysis as "untestable" and "refusing to be tested" under a distorted, paranoid, and pathological experience.)

3.2：

The aforementioned phenomenon—characterized by an acute insensitivity to the dynamics of psychic energy fluctuations and a deficit in high-level mentalization—remains highly prevalent. Historically, this configuration was a common feature within early Chinese online psychological communities, particularly those oriented toward psychodynamics (a phenomenon that has now migrated to groups on self-media platforms due to the decline of traditional forums). This persistent dynamic can be conceptualized as a microcosm of collective resistance against the discovered principles of various unconscious mechanisms.

In 2020, a trend re-emerged within the Chinese internet landscape that sought to invalidate the scientific status of psychoanalysis by leveraging Karl Popper's falsifiability framework, while simultaneously proclaiming behavioral models as the sole valid paradigm of psychology on the grounds that psychoanalysis is unprovable and inherently unfalsifiable. On the prominent platform Zhihu, a user deployed this Popperian framework to simulate a clinical scenario: an individual quarrels with his mother before leaving the house, experiences subsequent negative affect, and consequently trips and falls on the street. The author argued that a psychoanalyst would invariably attribute this event to the operations of an Oedipal complex; the critique was not that this interpretation was inherently incorrect, but rather that its epistemological status rendered it permanently impossible to verify or falsify.

In reality, the narrative constructed by this user, along with the Popperian propositions he cited, represents a classic evasion of psychic energy fluctuations. It signifies a detachment of attention from the dynamic, contextual landscape of psychic energy traces—a landscape that requires an experiential posture of curiosity, openness, and acceptance to be perceived as a real-time, unfolding process. Instead, the observer manifests a profound sensory numbness to the real-time, high-resolution traces of psychic operations.

In this state, attention is rigidly allocated to disavowing the dynamic expressions of the unconscious and preconscious, explicitly to sustain a conscious illusion: that the ego reigns as the omnipotent, absolute controller of its own psychic universe, and that the conscious self operates with complete lucidity and autonomy. This defensive maneuver is analogous to an individual within a dream who, instead of awakening, simply denies the reality of the dreaming state in order to manufacture a superficial semblance of waking lucidity.

Consequently, individuals operating under this self-validating framework are structurally constrained to perceiving only low-resolution, rudimentary event-contours lacking any nuanced gradations (e.g., the coarse sequence of "quarrelling with one's mother in the morning and falling on the street in the afternoon," or "quarrelling with one's mother in the morning and appearing entirely unaffected in the afternoon"). They remain blind to the high-resolution, finely graded trajectories of psychic energy fluctuations that manifest clinically (e.g., a patient who, upon entering the consulting room after a fall, exhibits a somatic pain response identical to that of the fall the moment their mother is mentioned; or conversely, a patient who discusses their mother with the absolute affective detachment typically reserved for a stranger).

The author of that critique erroneously conflated these highly distinct clinical phenomena under a singular, literal misinterpretation—falsely claiming that regardless of whether the patient falls or remains unaffected, the psychoanalyst will tautologically reduce the outcome to an emotional entanglement with the mother. This represents a literal, self-deceptive rationalization, akin to "covering one's own ears while stealing a bell."

Paradoxically, it is precisely those who rigidly adhere to this misapplication of Popperian logic who rely on such tautological rationalizations, precisely because they lack the capacity to employ empirical Bayesian updating to construct valid justifications for themselves or others. They take the low-resolution cognitive outputs generated by their own alexithymic deficits—wherein the mirror neuron system's capacity to decode the trajectories of psychic energy fluctuations has severely degenerated—and pathologically rationalize this inability to perceive clinical phenomena as a form of "scientific, logical evidence."

It is necessary to expand upon the foundational framework of Karl Popper's epistemology, which demonstrates critical conceptual obfuscations. Under his specific theoretical paradigm, a proposition must inherently possess the capacity to be erroneous in order to be classified as scientific, thereby leading to the problematic epistemological stance that scholars should place their scientific confidence primarily in potentially errant hypotheses rather than frameworks that resist immediate error.

Consider Newtonian mechanics: its incompleteness was only empirically demonstrated two centuries after its formulation; prior to that paradigm shift, its systematic incompleteness was entirely unperceived by the scientific community. Within Popper's logic, this presents a severe contradiction: did Newtonian mechanics exist as a non-science originally, only to suddenly transform into a science upon the discovery of its parameters of incompleteness? If this were the case, the pursuit of formulating increasingly comprehensive and explanatory scientific theories would paradoxically equate to the pursuit of constructing pseudo-science.

From a clinical and personality standpoint, this epistemological reductionism reflects a manifest cognitive propensity toward alexithymia and an autistic-like defensive stance. It resembles the insular world of an autistic child who structures their environment by manipulating exclusively clear, perfectly replicable, and hyper-controlled variables, rendering them fundamentally incapable of comprehending highly complex, non-linear logical matrices.

For instance, when confronting analogous regularities manifested across distinct historical eras and socio-cultural spaces, this rigid cognitive structure fails to recognize regularities that lack exact mechanical replication. Consequently, Popper's framework dismisses the cross-temporal, constrained, yet highly consistent regularities and principles inherent to the humanities, history, and social sciences as unrepeatable and unfalsifiable—a position that underscores a profound cognitive limitation.

This reductionism becomes conspicuously acute in Popper's critique of psychoanalysis. He formulated a highly implausible scenario wherein psychoanalytic practitioners across the globe could independently and coincidentally fabricate clinically compatible experiences, or utilize mutually fictionalized clinical narratives to systematically engineer "evidence."

In Conjectures and Refutations (1963), Popper asserted that a psychoanalyst is invariably capable of interpreting a patient's behavior in a manner that aligns with their theory, regardless of whether the behavior conforms to it, thereby rendering the theory unfalsifiable and unscientific. He further argued that although Freudian and Adlerian theories appear superficially contradictory, they possess the capacity to explain any conceivable behavior, meaning they cannot be falsified (Popper, K. 1963/2002. Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. Routledge).

This formulation indirectly implies that psychoanalysts selectively manipulate evidence to preserve the absolute validity of their theoretical models. Such a caricature-like conviction, completely divorced from realistic proportions, strongly suggests a psychopathological defense linked to the schizotypal spectrum.

What Popper defined as an epistemological "critique" is, in reality, a complete blindness to the dynamic trajectories of psychic energy fluctuations—a manifestation of an alexithymic condition that renders the individual entirely insensitive to the delicate, nuanced textures of subjective psychological expressions. Conversely, psychoanalysis functions precisely by capturing these diverse, dynamic trajectories of psychic energy fluctuations, systematically cross-comparing them to close the evidentiary chain and derive highly validated inferences.

Therefore, psychoanalysis does not operate as a tautological, self-validating circle; rather, it relies on the comprehensive cross-comparison of unconscious and preconscious psychic energy traces, operating via an implicit Bayesian statistical updating to deduce highly accurate, high-probability conclusions.

Furthermore, whenever an evidentiary chain fails to close, or when the established theoretical framework proves insufficient to explain the more meticulous, high-resolution textures of subjective experiential forms, the psychoanalytic paradigm is propelled to undergo theoretical refinement and evolution. It is precisely this empirical pressure that drove classical drive theory to evolve into object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, and ultimately into contemporary intersubjective systems theory.

However, these highly detailed, rich, and cross-compared subjectively manifested traces of psychic energy fluctuations remain fundamentally inaccessible to individuals like Popper. Such individuals display a pathological imperative to aggressively disavow the complex, non-fully-controllable unconscious entanglements of the internal world—attempting to eradicate these clinical complexities through idealized, imaginary conceptual settings.

They utilize an alexithymic defense to invalidate the institutional and scientific legitimacy of any psychology that demonstrates how the human ego is invariably subject to forces beyond its direct control, explicitly because such discoveries shatter their rigid illusion of being the absolute, autonomous ruler of their own subjective universe. This defensive structure resembles a paranoid pseudo-delusional state.

Their alexithymic deficits preclude them from understanding what these rich, systematically cross-compared outer expressions of psychic energy fluctuations actually entail. This occurs because their attentional apparatus is tightly enclosed within an obsessional, paranoid-like phantasy resembling the concept of Atma-graha (ego-attachment) in Buddhist philosophy—the absolute conviction that "my subjective universe is exclusively dictated and arranged by my own autonomous will."

Consequently, they are structurally incapable of allocating their attentional resources to those vivid, preconscious psychic energy fluctuations that persistently demonstrate that a vast, rich domain of subjective experience can neither be clearly perceived nor unilaterally dictated by the conscious will.

Popper's epistemological premise demands that empirical evidence must be "singular and mechanically replicable." From a clinical perspective, this insistence underscores pathological indicators akin to alexithymia and an autistic-like defense. An autistic configuration fundamentally gravitates towards mechanical, highly predictable environments, whereas an alexithymic posture seeks to reduce intricate psychological phenomena into the coarse, simplistic outlines of "objective facts."( Popper, K. 1945/2020. The open society and its enemies. Routledge)

However, empirical evidence within the psychological realm is inherently multi-layered and dynamic; psychological phenomena themselves are fluid, possessing highly nuanced gradations and intricate, multi-dimensional strata. Consequently, because Popper lacked the capacity to grasp this multi-layered texture, he erroneously conceptualized the multifaceted psychoanalytic interpretations—which naturally adapt to reflect these fluid and shifting psychological realities—as a form of "subjective and opportunistic self-validation."

This misapprehension led him to assume a stance of scientific rigor, whereas in reality, it represents a cognitive reduction of dimensionality—a pathological degeneration toward a low-resolution capacity for identifying and processing emotional and cognitive phenomena.

When Popper indirectly implied that psychoanalysts selectively interpret clinical evidence to preserve the absolute validity of their theoretical models, his underlying proposition essentially asserted that psychoanalysts worldwide systematically distort clinical evidence to construct fictionalized narratives that support their respective hypotheses. Yet, this position entirely overlooks—or fails to notice—a fundamental epistemological principle: if psychoanalysts across the globe were independently distorting their distinct clinical evidence and fabricating idiosyncratic "stories," these incomplete narratives would inevitably be mutually contradictory and logically incompatible.

In criminology and forensics, investigators routinely exploit this exact logic—comparing the distinct testimonies of a group regarding a singular event to determine whether the structural logic of their accounts coheres with normative reality, thereby establishing whether deception has occurred.

Remarkably, despite the profound theoretical divergences and manifest contradictions among global psychoanalytic schools, no school has historically questioned the empirical authenticity of the clinical narratives cited by opposing paradigms. This intersubjective consensus arises because practitioners universally encounter equivalent psychological phenomena within their own clinical spaces, varying exclusively in their interpretive frameworks.

The clinical phenomena observed by diverse psychoanalytic lineages (such as Freudians, Jungians, and Kleinians)—including transference, countertransference, defense mechanisms, and unconscious conflicts—exhibit a high degree of empirical replication, even if their theoretical formulations diverge. These varying, and at times contradictory, interpretations of a single phenomenon in fact constitute decodings of distinct structural layers of the same psychological reality.

For instance, whereas Freud might interpret a specific dream manifest as the repression of a psychosexual impulse, Jung might elucidate the same dream as an archetypal expression of the collective unconscious, and Klein might conceptualize it through the projection of early object relations. Each of these interpretations captures, from a distinct vantage point, the specific event-configuration and affective energy trajectories of this singular dream phenomenon and its accompanying subjective experience. Within a framework of implicit Bayesian updating, each interpretation aligns—with varying degrees of probability and clinical efficacy—with the actual expressive trajectories of the dreamer’s psychic energy.

In actuality, this methodology grasps different facets of a unified psychological object based on their structural hierarchy—specifically, their varying proximity to the core pathogenic variable. The underlying phenomenon remains intrinsically interconnected, and the interpretations can never be arbitrary; they are strictly bounded by "structural constraints."

If one were to discard these dynamic psychoanalytic interpretations when confronting a dream that Freud would analyze as psychosexual, and instead rigidly enforce what Popper deems a "scientific, inflexible" framework—claiming the dream is meaningless because it lacks mechanical replication, or asserting that the deep subjective experiences within the dream are incomprehensible because any understanding would defy falsifiability—such a reductionist claim would completely fail to cohere with the actual manifestations of the dreamer's psychic energy fluctuations.

Furthermore, such an inflexible explanation fails entirely to align with the subsequent developmental trajectory of the dreamer’s psychic energy upon encountering the interpretation. Crucially, it stands in absolute contradiction to the traceable, organic evolution of the dreamer's psychic energy fluctuations that spontaneously unfolds from the memory of the dream, even in the total absence of any clinical intervention.

On the other hand, the classical proposition that "Freud’s theory and Adler’s theory, though superficially contradictory, can explain any conceivable behavior and are therefore unfalsifiable" represents a textbook evasion of psychic energy fluctuations. It denotes a profound incapacity to recognize the meticulous psychic energy details that determine which theoretical paradigm better satisfies the increasing conditional probabilities of Bayesian updating, or which model aligns more precisely with predictions regarding the expressions of psychic energy fluctuations.

Individuals operating under this framework can exclusively decipher the coarsest event-contours devoid of any graded details, thereby erroneously assuming that all nuanced phenomena beneath these crude outlines are functionally identical. While presenting this reductionism as an epistemological virtue, it remains a highly problematic cognitive deficit—a manifest expression of an alexithymic configuration.

Furthermore, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper similarly critiqued psychoanalysis, asserting that its theoretical architecture is excessively flexible and structurally insulated from refutation by empirical evidence. This specific critique—that the structure and interpretation of psychoanalysis are too flexible to be countered by empirical evidence—constitutes a definitive failure in the perception and identification of dynamic psychic energy fluctuations. It exposes an inability to discern whether a given theory or narrative genuinely converges with the core essence of empirical evidence beneath its superficial event-outline—namely, the vivid, high-resolution, and meticulously differentiated trajectories through which rich, subtle psychic energy expresses itself.

Devoid of the capacity to attend to or decode these highly differentiated and rich expressions of mental life, such critics misinterpret the multi-layered and fluid explanations that naturally correspond to highly sophisticated human mental operations. They pathologically misread these precise formulations as opportunistic, self-validating, and "flexible rationalizations" designed to defend a framework against what their own alexithymic and autistic-like state demands should inherently be mechanical, rigid, and sterile objects.

What Popper characterized as the "flexibility of psychoanalytic interpretation" is by no means an arbitrary flexibility inherent to the interpretation itself. Rather, it represents an ongoing process of empirical Bayesian updating dictated by the shifting, actual traces of psychic energy fluctuations. It is the systematic identification of the most highly probable psychological mechanisms undergirding distinct mental activities, executed in strict accordance with the minute variations displayed by different psychological dynamics, or the fluid transformations unfolding across the temporal progression of a singular mental operation.

The flexibility does not reside within the interpretive apparatus; instead, it is the vivid, animate, and deeply nuanced human mental activity under examination that is inherently fluid and non-mechanical.

Regrettably, individuals characterized by an alexithymic structure remain blind to these inherently fluid, vivid, and highly sophisticated variations of human emotional life. Incapable of identifying the rich, graded differences and dynamic currents of psychic energy beneath the coarse event-contours, their compromised cognitive capacity forces them to decode any phenomena sharing an identical surface outline as "the exact same event," completely evacuated of internal psychological richness or affective variations.

Consequently, they paranoidly misidentify the organic fluidity of psychological phenomena as a mechanical, sterile, and stagnant state—analogous to physical phenomena at or near thermodynamic equilibrium, which lack the chaotic uncertainty, thermodynamic bifurcations, and spontaneous self-organization of complex systems—and claim that this supposedly rigid state has been subjectively and opportunistically explained away via "flexible" reasoning.

This specific Popperian pathology constitutes a powerful, structurally defensive factor driving psychological resistance against psychoanalysis, a factor heavily saturated with an alexithymic coloring that is, in reality, widely distributed across the general population.

Furthermore, the psychological phenomenon wherein an individual genuinely refuses belief on the ground that "one cannot ascertain whether a specific psychological interpretation is correct or incorrect" is fundamentally non-existent. In reality, both belief and disbelief represent mechanisms through which an individual's subjective experiential paradigm rigidly enforces its own preferred configuration of psychological reality.

When a proposition fails to cohere with the structural morphology of their internal paradigm, the individual pathologically judges it to be false or invalid. They deploy their own subjective experience—which has been cognitively processed and frequently distorted via internal presuppositions—as the sole epistemological benchmark to evaluate whether a psychological theory aligns with the mental representations in their own mind.

The defense is never an objective stance of "I cannot empirically verify these psychological assertions, therefore I remain agnostic as to their validity, rendering them unfalsifiable and unbelievable." Rather, the Popperian concept of "falsifiability" operates as a highly paradoxical, self-defeating epistemological construct.

Under the rigid application of Popper's doctrine, numerous logical absurdities inevitably arise. For instance, highly conventionalized yet non-scientific domains—such as literary theory, artistic techniques, or the syntax of a specific language—would satisfy all criteria of empirical verifiability and error-potential. If one deliberately violates syntactic structures or phonetics within a native linguistic community, the communication immediately fails, demonstrating empirical error; similarly, historical shifts organically transform syntax, and ignoring literary theory consistently precipitates aesthetic failures.

Crucially, literary theory is by no means an insulated, self-validating system devoid of theoretical evolution, as Popper's framework would assume. In fact, any pragmatically functional discipline—including systems like astrology or divination that generate subjective utility for their practitioners—cannot sustain a purely self-validating circle.

From the perspective of psychodynamics, a closed, tautological system that fails to generate any empirical positive feedback cannot be sustained by the ego, as it directly violates the Principle of Mental Economy, assuming the absence of explicit delusional states. Literary theory undergoes continuous historical paradigm shifts, and adhering strictly to its tenets guarantees no absolute creative success.

Consequently, literary theory exhibits every structural attribute that Popper attributes exclusively to "science." This exposes a fatal epistemological contradiction: does artistic creation—a domain fundamentally reliant on subjective inspiration rather than mechanistic science—qualify as a science under Popperian parameters? If so, the foundational architecture of his philosophy of science stands as a self-defeating rationalization.

Furthermore, highly rigid, self-validating narratives—such as continuously rescheduled apocalyptic predictions or claims that an extraterrestrial intelligence orchestrates global reality—are rejected by the collective consciousness not because they are "unfalsifiable and permanently explanatory," but precisely because they lack empirical efficacy.

The proposition that "the inability to detect extraterrestrials is caused by their absolute, omnipotent control over global information" is rejected because it has already been falsified by normative cognitive processes; the self-validating defenders simply disavow the falsification. It is rejected because it is recognized as empirically errant, not because it occupies an untestable domain between truth and falsehood.

In reality, the human mind continuously and preconsciously falsifies these tautological loops, even if the conscious ego remains unaware of this automated cognitive operation. The mind achieves this via a spontaneous application of a Russell-paradox-style refutation based on invariant standards.

The preconscious mind reasons: "If every empirical phenomenon can be unilaterally ascribed to an extraterrestrial conspiracy, then by identical logic, I can ascribe every phenomenon to a subterranean reptilian conspiracy; there exists no structural baseline to validate the former over the latter."

Consequently, the circular validation immediately collapses. Any secondary rationalizations introduced to sustain the loop will invariably collide with distinct empirical realities, rendering a genuinely "unfalsifiable" tautology impossible in actual human cognition. Every normative individual—excluding rigid adherents of Popperian reductionism—possesses the intuitive capacity to deploy this Russellian refutation to falsify circular rationalizations. These systems are inherently falsifiable; however, the majority of individuals lack the high-level mentalization required to elevate this preconscious cognitive operation into lucid, conscious awareness.

Synthesizing the formulations delineated above, it becomes readily transparent that the foundational vulnerability of Popper's paradigm converges upon two highly critical axes.

First, regarding the empirical objects of psychological inquiry—encompassing not only psychoanalysis but the entire spectrum of psychological sciences, toward which he maintained an antagonistic posture—Popper manifested a profound alexithymic configuration and an autistic-like defensive orientation. His mentalization apparatus remained severely compromised, rendering him structurally incapable of genuinely confronting the vivid outer expressions of human psychic energy fluctuations. This deficit induced a catastrophic truncation in the empirical source-material from which his theoretical observations were extracted.

Second, the internal logical architecture of his theoretical framework is inherently flawed. His conceptualization of "falsifiability" describes an operational reality that, with the singular exception of specific systematized delusional structures, virtually all human theoretical formulations and paradigms actively participate in and rely upon for their ongoing evolution. In the normative operations of human cognition and affective-rational ideation, a theoretical framework that remains absolutely, permanently unfalsifiable and limitlessly self-validating is structurally impossible.

It is exclusively due to Popper's severe cognitive-affective limitations—implying a manifest functional impairment within his mirror neuron system—that his attentional apparatus failed to decode the cross-comparative traces of nuanced, graded, and multi-layered psychological phenomena situated beneath rigid, mechanical event-contours.

This systemic limitation is further laid bare when historical interlocutors pose the critical reflexive question: "Is Popper's own criterion of falsifiability—which demarcates science from non-science—itself falsifiable?"

Faced with this contradiction, adherents of the Popperian paradigm frequently employ a defensive splitting maneuver, arguing that because Popper was constructing a philosophy of science rather than an empirical science, his framework is exempt from the requirement of falsifiability. This defense immediately triggers a dual logical collapse:

The First Reflexive Paradox: Under the strict parameters of Popper's own doctrine, a proposition that is unfalsifiable is relegated to an epistemological status wherein one can never ascertain whether it is correct or incorrect. Consequently, if the adherents themselves acknowledge that their foundational philosophical framework is inherently unfalsifiable, they must logically concede that they possess no epistemological grounds to determine whether their own model is true or false. Under the strict parameters of Popper’s own doctrine, a proposition that is unfalsifiable is relegated to an epistemological status wherein one can never ascertain whether it is correct or incorrect. Consequently, by their own baseline standards, adherents of this paradigm should logically refuse belief in their own theory, given that they themselves lack any epistemic means to determine whether their own unfalsifiable framework is true or false. Following this internal logic, they are fundamentally precluded from investing faith in their own model, let alone employing it as a normative constraint to regulate or invalidate the disciplines of others.

The Second Axiological Paradox: Popper's framework explicitly dictates that falsifiable propositions command a fundamentally higher epistemological credibility than unfalsifiable ones. Paradoxically, he and his followers utilize a philosophical framework that—by virtue of being unfalsifiable—occupies a structurally lower tier of credibility under their own criteria, explicitly to define, regulate, and categorize empirical science, which they deem to possess higher systemic credibility.

These two interconnected Russellian paradoxes do not constitute minor peripheral errors; rather, they compromise the entire structural keel and spinal column of the Popperian doctrine.

In terms of psychological economy, this entire epistemological illusion is sustained by an affective conceptual displacement: it treats the mere mechanical state of "being falsifiable and capable of being proven errant" as an emotional guarantee of empirical rectitude. By pathologically substituting the potential for error with the certitude of scientific superiority, this defensive framework serves to generate a highly insular, self-validating state of omnipotent cognitive gratification.