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There have been several clarion calls in the history of American psychoanalysis regarding the need for greater and more sophisticated empirical research. One came in 1981, when the American Psychoanalytic Association commissioned a joint task force on careers in psychoanalytic research. Philip Holzman, a psychoanalyst and experimental psychopathologist who directed a pioneering psychopathology laboratory at Harvard for much of his career (until his death in 2004), chaired this task force. He was one of only a few clinical psychologists to receive full psychoanalytic training within an APsaA-accredited institute in the 1950s. Holzman and his task force colleagues concluded that psychoanalysis “requires the nourishment which comes from those who devote themselves essentially full-time to the research effort. Without this group, psychoanalysis is in danger of falling behind in its scientific status” (quoted in Holzman and Perry 1986, p. 179; emphasis added). An outgrowth of this recommendation was a panel co-chaired by Holzman and J. Christopher Perry, held at the fall meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1983, titled “Borderline Personality Disorders (BPD): Research Issues and New Empirical Findings.” This panel coincided with the first DSM manual to formally recognize BPD and personality disorders more generally, according them their own axis and diagnostic research criteria.
Twenty-seven years later, the following contribution by Mark Lenzenweger—a former postdoctoral fellow in Holzman's lab—is a testament to the enormous growth in empirical knowledge of personality disorders (PDs) and BPD since that time. This review invites us to revisit the warning of Holzman and colleagues and ask ourselves anew, Has psychoanalysis fallen behind in the empirical study of PDs?