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In recent years there have been increasing calls for quantitative empirical research supporting the efficacy and effectiveness of psychoanalytic treatments (Fonagy et al. 2001; Gabbard, Gunderson, and Fonagy 2002; Leuzinger-Bohleber and Target 2002; Wallerstein 2003). Contemporary standards of evidence-based medical treatments and scientific verifiability require that psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis submit to standardized systematic evaluation if they are to continue their claims to be valid and effective treatments. The empirically supported psychotherapy movement, though controversial, has advanced in the last ten years, and there is growing agreement that all psychotherapies must use these standards for evaluation (Bergin and Garfield 1994; Chambless et al. 1996; Norcross 2001). Organizations funding psychotherapy, including insurance companies, government agencies, and employers, have been especially vocal in demanding empirical evidence for the value of a treatment before devoting resources to it. Agencies funding research, including the National Institutes of Health in the United States and analogous agencies in Europe and South America, have taken up the call as well; they fund psychotherapy research on the condition that it is part of this central move toward an empirically supported approach. Finally, organizations responsible for the education of mental health professionals (e.g., the American Association of Directors of Psychatric Residency Training), are debating whether, given limited resources and time, programs must focus their training on psychotherapies meeting evidence-based criteria.
Consistent with its hundred-year history of conflicted relations with empirical research, psychoanalysis has reacted to these increasing pressures in complicated ways (Blatt 2001; Luborsky 2001; Safran