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Brian Robertson opened the panel by imparting a sense of urgency to the proceedings. He spoke of the pressing need for research into the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, not only to allow analysts “to convert clinical beliefs into psychoanalytic knowledge,” but to better answer the challenges of detractors from academia and the market-driven health care system. Even if analysts agree the method works, Robertson continued, “how can we demonstrate this to friend and foe?”
Any mechanism of action must be based on a theory of change. To date, there is no one vision about change. In keeping with theoretical pluralism, any useful model of change will embody multiple causality. Here, Robertson cited Michels's distillation of three overarching theories of change: insight, intensity of emotional experience, and the new relationship with a new object.
Robertson continued by saying that analysts who stress insight also stress interpretation. “Clearly a belief in the power of truth and knowledge is implicit here.” Those who stress intensity of experience believe that rigidly held beliefs, buttressed by rigid intrapsychic structures—created in part by early trauma and fashioned from emergency compromise formations—are shaken and changed by powerful affects. Cognitive scientists argue that a certain affective arousal is important for consolidation of new experience in the mind/brain.
Robertson stated further that analysts who believe in the crucial nature of the interaction stress the experience of both partners in the analytic relationship. These creative interacting subjectivities will lead