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In his recent address to the IPA Executive Council meeting (January 2001), IPA President Otto Kernberg discussed, among other matters, the importance of a research function in the “ideal institute.” He called for the establishment of a department of research within our groups and said he believed research methodology should be a
required part of the psychoanalytic curriculum. This book, Does Psychoanalysis Work? raises many of the questions that could be addressed in such psychoanalytic research. It also provides a thorough, even exhaustive, survey of the major studies into the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis, discussing relevant methods of inquiry and suggesting directions for future study to help mitigate some of the problems inherent in quantifying the complex variables in such a highly varied and often subjective field as ours.
The four authors (the first from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, the second from the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and the last two from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute) produced this ambitious book as a more detailed followup to their well-known earlier article (Bachrach et al. 1991). They have divided their work into three major sections.
In the first part, “What Psychoanalysts Want to Know about the Therapeutic Effects of Psychoanalysis,” the authors review a plethora of questions that have been raised since the time of Freud about analyzability, analytic theory and its impact on outcome, the relevance of specific techniques, and the mechanics of analysis (for example, frequency and length of sessions, the decision to use the couch, and the importance of fees). They also discuss the use of transference and countertransference, the role of the analyst's individual personality, the cultural milieu in which analysis takes place, and perhaps most important, possible goals of psychoanalysis. These goals can include the relief of suffering, structural change in the patient's personality, the discovery of “truth” o