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Nancy McWilliams has a long-standing interest in presenting psychoanalysis in a way that is accessible to students from a range of backgrounds, and who are treating a wide variety of patients. Passionately interested in individual differences, she has cultivated a clinical practice with a patient population that is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and diagnosis.
McWilliams feels that when it comes to research, our field has continued to suffer from some of the arrogance that typified it during its heyday-the sense that our ideas are self-evidently correct and don't need to be tested through controlled empirical study. She sees other systemic factors contributing to the research/practice split:
▮ Analytic institutes are typically not university based, so there is an absence of dialogue with other intellectuals and researchers
▮ PsyD programs (which she otherwise supports) de-emphasize research in favor of clinical training
▮ The increased difficulty of the tenure and promotion process in academia requires an increased involvement in grant application processes and thus less likelihood that researchers' extensive experience with practice will inform their research.
Nancy noted that contemporary researchers often lack empathy for the kinds of problems clinicians deal with and can be contemptuous of therapists for not taking the time to read research. On the other hand, therapists view research as not relevant to them, especially when it comes to randomized control studies with cherry-picked patients, delimited treatment time spans, and outcomes measures limited to the relief of observable symptoms. This kind of research in particular leaves McWilliams cold, as it does not address the kinds of complex growth and development that matter to therapists.
Nancy finds some areas of research particularly interesting and relevant to practice. Long-term outcome studies of therapy as it is ac