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This panel addressed the following questions: What do we psychoanalysts know and how do we acquire that knowledge? What are the limits of this knowledge and how is this question related to our methods of obtaining it? How do we discuss these issues and how do we validate our knowledge and our methodology?
Juan Pablo Jimenez began by advocating a sceptical attitude as the most suitable in exploring the foundations of the psychoanalytic method. Jimenez noted that a broad consensus supports Freud's idea that psychoanalytical knowledge emerges from the psychoanalytical clinical situation. In Freud's view, psychoanalysis refers to the procedure for the investigation of mental process, a method for the treatment of neurotic disorders, and a collection of psychological information obtained in these ways, which gradually becomes accumulated into a scientific discipline. For Freud the distinction between method of discovery and method of demonstration of the validity of what was discovered was not particularly relevant. For Jimenez, however, the relationships among interpretive method, theory and science are much more complex than Freud envisaged. Both therapeutic change as well as construction of theory spring from sources other than those acknowledged by the three-part model described above. Since Freud, the psychoanalytical method has undergone a process of idealisation, which has been replaced more recently by perplexity and plurality of approaches.
Turning to the problem of validity of the psychoanalytic method, Jimenez differentiated between the validity of knowledge and the origin of such knowledge. It is not enough to state that a given theory or technical approach originated in clinical experience to accept them as valid. Jimenez questioned Freud's assertion that the abundance of reliable observations makes them independent of the need for verification. Moreover, Freud did not foresee the fragmentation and pluralism in psychoanalysis today. There is no longer a belief