Problems in Psycho-Analytic Research1

It is difficult to consider appropriate goals and methods for psycho-analytic research until one has a clear idea of why we place so much value on research, and what we hope to gain from it. Psycho-analysis contains a theory of motivation, and it is primarily a genetic theory. I propose to apply these two principles to the question of why we devote energy to psycho-analytic research before considering some of the difficulties in how such research is to be conducted.

Freud's work, and that of his associates, was of course research, though it did not require the investigator to take any steps which he would not have taken as part and parcel of his clinical work with patients. Later on I shall return to some discussion of psycho-analytic practice as a research tool, but for the moment I wish to think about the changes which have occurred during roughly the last ten years which may have to do with the sudden increase of research enterprises related to psycho-analysis. Two trends among many seem especially relevant.

• 1In the course of the last decade, and especially since the last war, psycho-analysis gained in influence not only within the psychiatric profession but upon the public at large. Much more energetic attempts, therefore, were made to apply the content of psycho-analytic knowledge to life situations outside psycho-analytic treatment. To put it naïvely, educators, pediatricians, sociologists and anthropologists, surgeons and criminologists all had reason to believe that if psycho-analytic theory was correct, this had important implications for their own work. If psycho-analytic understanding of infantile sexuality, for instance, is universally true, then, it is thought, it follows that such and such is the best way to rear children, to run an army, to collect anthropological data, etc. The logic of some of these inferences may be open to question, but the fact is that the implications of psycho-analytic understanding for all aspects of human behaviour were