Psychoanalytic Therapy Research: A Commentary

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has had two contending perspectives on how to most effectively enhance its theoretical and clinical knowledge base: the traditional intensive case study method innovated by Freud (dubbed qualitative research) and the later developed formal empirical research in accord with the usual canons of objective, natural science (quantitative research). An article by Irwin Hoffman (2009), arguing that objective empirical research should not be privileged over traditional subjective intensive case study as an avenue to psychoanalytic knowledge increase, has aroused multiple responses, pro and con, by psychoanalytic clinicians and researchers. This article assesses four of those responses.

Keywords:

• psychotherapy research
• psychodynamic psychotherapy
• empirically supported treatments
• evidence-based medicine
• randomized control trial
• psychoanalytic therapy research
• clinical case studies

Notes

¹ Here he differs somewhat from André Green, who does not regard psychoanalysis as a psychology at all, but rather as a discipline sui generis, distinct from psychology, which has its separate existence and separate findings, useful as they are, but not at all applicable to psychoanalysis, whose findings and theorizing can only come from the interaction within the psychoanalytic consulting room itself. See, in this connection, Green (1996a, 1996b, 2000) and Wallerstein (1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert S. Wallerstein

Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D., is emeritus professor and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine; emeritus training and supervising analyst, San Francisco Center of Psychoanalysis; former president, American Psychoanalytic Association (1971–1972); former president, International Psychoanalytical Association (1985–1989); and principal investigator, Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation (1952–1986).