Five Empirical Psychoanalytic Methods

THERE ARE FIVE ESSENTIAL WAYS psychoanalysts now do their therapeutic inquiry: (1) talking, (2) interpreting, (3) relating, (4) experiencing, and (5) centering. They are the major empirical methods of psychoanalytic inquiry available for clinical use at present. Not that every psychoanalyst must use them all, but that no psychoanalyst can use none at all. They were developed at definite stages in the history of psychoanalysis, each one finely molded to the systematic and interpretive overview of the therapeutic experience held at a particular stage of that history. Psychoanalytic therapy takes its origin and finds its meaning in the theory of unconscious psychic experience, first formulated as the theory of the hypnoid state over 100 years ago. It remains, in my view, the cornerstone of all the empirical methods of psychoanalytic therapy built around it. To list them with their terms of empirical observation: (1) discursive abreaction of emotion, (2) interpretation of transference, (3) relatedness to resistance, (4) experience of anxiety, (5) centering of the self. The theory and the methods are reciprocally intertwined. It sustains them; they extend it.

I introduce the fuller discussion with a brief historical note of review. First, (1) patients did the talking, and their psychoanalysts listened to their abreactions. Then, patients talked, and (2) psychoanalysts both talked, and (3) psychoanalysts related with detailed inquiry as participant observers and/or interpreters to patients relating to them in defense, for security. Then, (4) patients and psychoanalysts both experienced anxiety and counteranxiety