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In his introductory remarks to the panel, the Chairman, Herbert J. Schlesinger, observed that psychoanalysis has held rather mixed attitudes toward research. Rightly regarding itself to be a science, it has yet been defensive about its method, especially when challenged about the scientific limitations of the private, secluded situation in which its findings are obtained, a situation that admits of no outside observers and seems essentially nonreplicable.
Although psychoanalysis, particularly in recent years, has openly encouraged research in many areas, it has rarely encouraged research into the psychoanalytic situation itself. While a negative climate is perhaps partially responsible for the paucity of research into the psychoanalytic process, a more serious impediment is the fact that such research is fearfully difficult to do. When one imposes a research purpose upon a therapeutic analysis and intrudes into the psychoanalytic situation in pursuit of the research, the complexities of both the research and the therapy mount exponentially.
Schlesinger discussed the requirements incumbent on the analyst who would conduct research on the psychoanalytic process. He must first assure that a psychoanalysis is, in fact, taking place, and then, that the research procedures introduced do not significantly distort the psychoanalytic process.
Another requirement is that the analytic data must be "public," i.e., available for independent study by others than the one who gathered them. Some have thought that the advent of sound recording provided a