Research in Psychoanalysis: Experimental Studies

The panel was to have been chaired by Alfred H. Stanton, but, because Stanton was ill, Kenneth Calder served as chairman. After introducing the panelists, Calder called attention to the fact that under Stanton's chairmanship the Workshop on Research in Psychoanalysis was one of the oldest regularly scheduled workshops at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It was routinely well-attended and characterized by vigorous discussion. Despite this, it would be a mistake not to acknowledge that most analysts neither engage in the kind of formal research done by Gottschalk and Luborsky, nor are they familiar with formal research methods. The group of formal research investigators have arcane skills in grant writing, statistics, and methodology unfamiliar to most analysts. The goal of the ongoing research workshop and of this panel is to reduce that breach by presenting for discussion some distinguished research applications of psychoanalytic theory. Calder further indicated that the discussion might also touch upon some of the institutional reasons for the breach and that he had some comments on this topic in his own prepared presentation. He called upon Lester Luborsky to open the panel presentations with remarks about his work on the symptom-context method for research in symptom formation.1

Luborsky began by pointing out that Freud's theories of symptom formation had never been tested systematically. His own research was prompted by the need to take a fresh look at symptom formation by adding controlled methods of verification to the older familiar methods of clinical observation. No one has known whether the language of the patient and other behavior in treatment would contain more conflict-associated ingredients before a symptom than at other times. Furthermore, no one has known whether all symptoms would occur in the same verbal context, or whether some, such as physical symptoms, might show regular differences from the psychological ones. Fi