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Claude Levi-Strauss said the scientist is not necessarily the person who gives the right answers, but the person who asks the right questions. This volume illustrates that some psychoanalysts are still a long way from asking helpful questions about the role of research. The volume contains the edited proceedings of a conference cum debate, primarily between Daniel Stern and André Green, on the value of empirical research to psychoanalysis. The conference organizers and editors of this volume clearly intended to illuminate. Instead, the book reinforces the same unhelpful assumptions that have squelched psychoanalytic research for generations.
André Green casts himself in the role of arch antiempiricist and staunch defender of the psychoanalytic faith, or his version of it. He sees empirical research as not only irrelevant to psychoanalysis but as a subversive threat to its spirit. He impugns the credentials of psychoanalytic researchers and implies they are unqualified to be psychoanalysts: “Being listed in the membership roster of the International Psychoanalytical Association is no longer enough,” he writes. “Screen memories are a psychoanalytic notion. We could also speak of ‘screen trainings’” (p. 26).
Green opens the debate with a fallacy: “the noble term ‘research’ carries such an amount of prestige that it is to be expected that any reference to it might compel one to bow before it. Unfortunately, compared with the richness of the clinical experience of psychoanalysis, the findings of researchers look very meager” (p. 21). The fallacy is that psychoanalysis has accorded research undue prestige. Green adopts the aggrieved tone of the marginalized minority, as if his were a lone voice in a wilderness of analysts who privilege empirical data over clinical experience. Of course the opposite is true. Historically, psychoanalysis has greeted research with indifference (for a discussion of the complex and problematic relationship between psychoanalysis and academic res