Jonathan Shedler Replies

JS: I am concerned that the author seems to have profoundly misunderstood my article. The author refers repeatedly to “Shedler's call for more research employing experimental methodologies.” I was not “calling” for anything. Nor am I a fan of randomized controlled trials as a method of inquiry for understanding psychotherapy. Far from being a fan, I think this particular research method is distinctly unhelpful. I was simply reporting on the research that exists, that has been conducted by others. The author has attributed to me beliefs I do not hold and is critiquing primarily his own fantasy about what I believe and advocate.

This is a good illustration of the problem in our field: People talk past one another. An article that was intended primarily to reassure psychoanalytic practitioners that empirical research supports what we do (and does not, as widely reported, favor CBT over psychoanalytic therapy) has somehow become, in the minds of this author and others, a “call” to radically jettison everything of value in psychodynamic thinking. What a sad commentary on the state of our field, and our collective inability to engage in virtually any constructive dialogue, even among ourselves.

DIVISION/Review (DL): In 2004 you published a review in JAPA of a book entitled: Clinical and Observational Psychoanalytic Research: Roots of a Controversy (Sandler, Sandler, Davies, eds.). One key point that you make in that review is that not only should clinical psychoanalysts be open to the possibility of research but that research methodology can and should be open to psychoanalytic theory and its principles: that the task is finding a way to develop optimal matches between theory and research.

Many clinical psychoanalysts assume that research methods and indeed all empirically testable hypotheses will necessarily be overly rigid and that they can never be attuned to the significant and subtle clinical questions that arise in psychoanalytic practice. This is a view associated wit