Studying Psychoanalysis: Asking and Answering the Hard Questions

How do we study psychoanalysis—its basic constructs, underlying theoretical frameworks, and clinical practice—in creative and productive ways? Running throughout Patrick Lutyen, Sidney Blatt, and Jozef Corveleyn's challenging target paper and the exchange with Donald Spence and Richard Almond is this deep and challenging question. Despite answers offered by proponents of particular positions, singular solutions to this complex problem are not yet readily available. Our target paper lucidly delineates several long-standing debates about psychoanalytic research, explicating the assumptions underlying both various perspectives and the polarizations that fuel these debates and on occasion are sharpened by them.

“Minding the Gap” refers to the seemingly vast differences between investigators' data-analytic and interpretive practices. Luyten and his coauthors delineate two “camps” or “schools of thought” within psychoanalysis; each is linked with different methods for studying clinical and theoretical questions, “one more clinical in orientation, more focused on meaning and interpretation, and relying primarily on the traditional case study method, the other more research-oriented, focused on cause-and-effect relationships, and relying primarily on methods borrowed from the natural and social sciences.” The case study “school” is most often associated with methods drawn from traditions within the humanities—literature, history, cultural studies—that most prominently employ narrative and hermeneutic approaches. The possibility for synergy—intermethodological collaborations—between such different approaches is at times raised by the authors. Yet whether these methods are ripe for such collaborative linkage remains problematic, a significant point raised by Spence: “it may be too early to choose between the two schools of investigation outlined in the target paper— the two opposing camps facing each other across the gap”. He goes on: