The Contemporary Psychoanalyst at Work: Research—Continuing Dialogues

The three papers in this issue that anchor JAPA's commitment to feature psychoanalytic research regularly (see JAPA: The Next Half-Century, p. 5), extend and enrich themes expressed in papers published here during the past year in “Varieties of Psychoanalytic Research” (50/2) and “Psychoanalytic Practice and Research: New Explorations and Implications” (50/3).

Contributions to the latter emphasized key challenges we now face in bringing contemporary research approaches to bear, meaningfully, upon psychoanalysis, so as to study rigorously our conceptual frame-works and clinical practices. Karlen Lyons-Ruth (1998) clearly articu-lates these challenges: “Psychoanalysis is faced with the challenge of altering its culture to sustain parallel and mutually renewing scientific and clinical traditions. This will involve a need for the more stream-lined and technical versions of the constructs necessary for research while continuing to support the richer and more evocative language needed to capture the essence of psychoanalytic work in vivo” (p. 130).

In order to engage successfully with the perspectives and the empirical approaches of related disciplines, we must be prepared to sharpen the meanings of relevant constructs (theoretical and clinical), and be ready to eschew such obfuscating polarizations as qualitative or quantitative research, objective versus subjective data, descriptive or