Continued Dialogues in Search of New Knowledge

Our regularly appearing research sections are designed especially to acquaint our readers with new and ongoing investigations relevant to clinical and conceptual questions within psychoanalysis. In this second of the 2004 sections, we continue to present work intended to provoke lively dialogue among clinicians, scholars, scientists, and educators. The diverse topics covered in past and present contributions include conceptualizing change and outcome in child psychoanalysis; challenges to systematically studying processes in ongoing psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy; the clearer delineation of changes in psychoanalytic education and practice; and the interface between attachment perspectives and other developmental theories, including psychoanalysis.

To present these diverse themes we have used varied formats. Blatt and Shohar's richly conceptual and empirical paper, “Psychoanalysis: With Whom, for What, and How: An Empirical Investigation of Differences between Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy” (JAPA 52/2) focused on an enduring question in psychoanalytic and psychotherapy research, the implications of patients' individual differences (beyond diagnostic ones) for psychotherapy process and outcome. Collections of papers, poster abstracts, exchanges of letters, and discussions around a target paper are other formats we use to foster an understanding of how research can add to psychoanalytic knowledge. In the current intellectual climate, such a deepened understanding of psychoanalytic constructs and clinical experience must often draw on “neighboring disciplines” (Holzman and Aronson 1992) to further clarify psychoanalytic phenomena through patient and analyst reports, as well as through observations of psychoanalytic processes though the observation of analyst-patient interactions. Besides the “enduring dialectic between body and mind” (Mayes 2003, p. 745) the contributions we publish take up other crucial interfaces—neurobiological and