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Stuart Ablon and Enrico Jones, in this target paper, address an issue central to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice—the def inition of psychoanalytic process. Some investigators (e.g., Vaughan et al. 1997) report difficulty arriving at a consensus def inition of what practicing psychoanalysts mean by “psychoanalytic process.” Difficulty def ining something so basic and fundamental may reflect the remarkable diversity of contemporary psychoanalytic thought and practice. But this lack of agreement about such a central construct creates serious problems for contemporary clinical practice, training, and research. Thus, one has to admire the ef forts of the late Enrico Jones, over many years, and of his student and protégé, Stuart Ablon, to address this vitally important question, and to do so systematically and rigorously—to try to define the psychoanalytic process empirically and to test the implications of this definition by comparing different forms of psychotherapeutic intervention to this definition. Ablon and Jones have also developed a method, based on Q-sort methodology, for identifying patterns of therapeutic interaction in specific patient-therapist dyads. This enables them to investigate different patterns of interaction in the therapeutic process and their role in therapeutic outcome.
Ablon and Jones use a well-established conceptual and statistical methodology, one particularly suited for identifying variations among individuals or among processes rather than identifying differences among variables—the Q-methodology originally conceptualized and developed by William Stephenson in the 1950s based on his experiences with the British statistician Sir Cyril Burt. Probably because Stephenson and Carl Rogers were faculty colleagues in the University of Chicago psychology department in the early 1950s, some of the earliest applications