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From Studies on Hysteria onwards, Freud tried to lay down scientific foundations for psychoanalysis. All his work can be viewed as research informed by being able to re-define his own provisional conclusions, starting off from new phenomena that manifest themselves in the field of his own observations. Many other authors after him followed this line and maintained that the clinical situation is best suited for research in psychoanalysis. In light of this conceptual assumption, in this paper we explore the Three-Level-Model for Observing the Patient's Transformations and the research project based upon it which has been promoted by the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. Here, the scientific and institutional short-, medium- and long-term goals of the research groups based on the Three-Level-Method are explored. This is a heuristic method which has been conceived to carry out systematic clinical observations of the transformations of the patients in psychoanalytic treatment that can be used as a working protocol for discussion groups aiming to enhance, through a systematic analysis of the clinical material, the observational skills of the participants and to improve analysts' listening and capacity for working through - the so-called «second look».
KEYWORDS: Groups, three-level-model, observation, research, transformations.