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In our editorial introduction to the fall 2005 issue of this journal we raised the possibility of starting a section dedicated to psychoanalytic research. Our aim is to present all varieties of the burgeoning psychoanalytic research in this section. Initially, we will favour manuscripts that deal with empirical research involving psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The empirical strand of the psychoanalytic research enterprise has not been well represented in the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis /Revue canadienne de psychanalyse (CJP/RCP), with the exception of the special research issue in the fall of 2004. With the publication of “Mentalization of Affects: An Exploratory Study of Psychic Elaboration and In-Session Expression of Affects during a Brief Psychodynamic Intervention for Depression” by Beretta et al. from the Universities of Lausanne and Montreal, we have begun to realize this goal.
In the prologue to the special research issue of the CJP/RCP, J. C. Perry and I noted that in recent decades such disciplines as the basic neurosciences, cognitive psychology, and psychopharmacology have increased in the number of researchers, in their funding, and in their representation on scientific review boards and the editorial boards of journals. The progress of these disciplines has strengthened demands that our treatments be evidence-based. This movement has increased the pressure on organized psychoanalysis to justify the psychoanalytic therapies as evidence-based, according to prevailing research methodologies. The result is that, at least in North America, psychoanalysis has ceded its central role in psychology, on scientific funding bodies, and in university departments of psychiatry. Faced with these challenges, psychoanalysis is in danger of losing its credibility among members of the scientific community, in academic departments, and in the eyes of the public at large. The marginalization of psychoanalysis, with its seminal insights into mind-bra