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The psychoanalysis of Mrs. C, lasting six years, was carried out and recorded for research purposes about half a century ago, at the beginning of what has been termed the “golden age” of psychoanalytic process research, as noted in the introduction to this issue. It is unfortunate for the field that this period of strong interest in process research was also a period in which psychoanalysis was dominated by views of theory and technique that are widely seen as rigid and limiting today. The field has become broader and more flexible in the intervening years, but the clinical advances have coincided with a diminished focus on treatment research.
We can identify several reasons for this decline in process research. Researchers have turned to studies of treatment outcome to hold the place of psychodynamic treatment in the mental health field. There is increased interest in neurological and biological factors—and, of course, more funding available in those areas. It is also true that it is difficult and time-consuming to do systematic and reliable process studies with adequately large samples, using ratings by judges. Some kinds of automatized measures are needed to enable sufficient sample sizes for statistical power, but in order to provide useful results, the measures need to be understood within a systemic theoretical framework, and the results that are produced have to concern dimensions that are of interest to clinicians. We feel it is now becoming possible to meet these needs, with new ideas concerning psychoanalytic theory and the new measures available today.
The computerized linguistic measures applied in studying this case were developed in the theoretical context of multiple coding and the referential process and derive their clinical significance from that framework (Bucci, 1997a, 2021a, 2021b). The approach that is offered in this issue, looking at the same session material through the lenses of different clinical perspectives as well as research measures, al