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What got you interested in psychoanalytic research? What is your research background (grad school, work, etc.)?
I've worn two hats from the beginning. I graduated from the personality program at the University of Michigan. I worked with faculty mentors doing research in personality and social psychology. I also took the clinical curriculum. At the time, the Michigan clinical program was basically a psychoanalytic institute. So I lived in two worlds. When I was with the researchers, I was a researcher. When I was with the clinicians, I was a clinician.
My research mentors didn't understand why I was interested in “all this psychoanalytic stuff.” At various times, I heard it referred to as religion, superstition, and a cult. I also encountered resistance from some of the psychoanalytic faculty who regarded me as an interloper. What I was trying to do just wasn't “done.” There is a lot of talk these days about the science-practice schism. I was living the science-practice schism.
This experience shaped my view of the profession. I saw how clinicians and researchers did not talk to each other. I saw firsthand the insularity and arrogance of some of the psychoanalytic clinicians of the time. I also saw how arid, artificial, and fundamentally unpsychological research in psychology could be and how irrelevant much of it was to the needs of real clinicians and real patients.
A certain amount of psychological research looks to me like a game of “let's pretend”: let's pretend we are studying something important while ignoring virtually everything that is psychologically meaningful. For example, too many studies rely on responses to self-report questionnaires. If you believe that unconscious mental life matters, this kind of research can seem silly and superficial. I resolved that my own research would always address unconscious mental life.
Living the schism sounds like a conflictual place to exist. How do you find yourself managing both sides, or have you been able to build an ef