THE CENTRAL FACT-GATHERING COMMITTEE was established by this Association in 1952, under the chairmanship of Dr. Harry Weinstock, and charged with the responsibility of setting up a method for pooling the data of psychoanalytic practice. Starting modestly and developing a procedure that ensured professional confidentiality, it was hoped that increasingly meaningful data might be accumulated. For several years, data-gathering was intensive. A questionnaire worked out by the original committee was filled out by hundreds of psychoanalysts on thousands of their patients. Initial enthusiasm ran high, in the hope that psychoanalysts might take an important step toward the pooling of information and toward scientific objectivity in the handling of data. As a practical matter, however, it was often difficult for analysts to complete the questionnaires. Long-recognized ambiguities