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I imagine that my title will seem provocative to some, the continuation of a purportedly unnecessary dichotomizing of clinical and research paradigms in psychoanalysis, just as argued in “Systematic Empirical Research versus Clinical Case Studies: A Valid Dichotomy?” by Morris Eagle and Donald Wolitzky (2011), a critique of Irwin Z. Hoffman's “Doublethinking Our Way to “Scientific” Legitimacy: The Desiccation of Human Experience” (2009). However, it is important to recognize that this debate takes place within a larger historical context, one in which the rise of instrumental reason serving technology threatens to overwhelm and dismantle many of the achievements of the humanities as a whole (Nussbaum 2010). While many of the concerns raised in the current dialogue were addressed years ago in the context of earlier discussions of hermeneutic philosophy in psychoanalysis and the critical responses to hermeneutic psychoanalysis (Eagle 2003; Gadamer 1975; Grünbaum 1984; Ricouer 1981; Sass and Woolfolk 1988; Schafer 1983; Spence 1982, , 1993), the current social and political environment has revived the unresolved issues of that early debate and forces us to reconsider the nature of psychoanalysis and its future. It must be emphasized, as Hoffman (2009) has argued, that this is a dialogue motivated as much by political and cultural concerns as it is by scientific or philosophical ones.
In Eagle and Wolitzky's critique of Hoffman, and in many other discussions of the need for quantitative empirical psychoanalytic research, the argument is made that there is no need to dichotomize research and clinical epistemologies, which instead are presented as complementary