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The authors are to be commended for bringing empirical methodology to the study of psychoanalysis. They do the field a great service by operationalizing psychoanalytic concepts into competing hypotheses and examining the testable consequences of these different views of the mind. Weiss and Sampson are correct when they say, "There is no strong tradition within psychoanalysis of deducing testable consequences from a particular hypothesis … if psychoanalytic theory is to be tested empirically, such deductions are necessary." The authors rightly separate treatment from the research process and emphasize the necessity of replication.
Despite the title of their book, Weiss and Sampson's study is not only of the psychoanalytic process, but also of the much larger issue of mental functioning. They explore mental functioning, using psychoanalytic treatment as their microscope and experiemental method. Very few other studies so explicitly use psychoanalysis as a research tool, which in itself makes this work worthwhile.
The authors' research method involved verbatim transcripts and process notes of an analysis carried out in a different city by an analyst unfamiliar with the research hypotheses. Rater measures of the patient's and analyst's behaviors were made with an attempt to maintain rater blindness. Blindness is always a difficult process in this type of research since it is frequently difficult to decide what raters should be blind to.
Nearly all of the studies reported make use of the first 100 sessions of the analysis of Mrs. C. The one report on termination uses the last 100 sessions. One can rightly wonder whether the authors' hypotheses would be supported if a different phase of analysis were examined. This is an empirical question that highlights the issue of whether the mind functions differently in different stages of a psychoanalysis or,