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Dear Sirs,
David Tuckett's proposal of developing a methodology for evaluating psychoanalytic papers (‘Evaluating psychoanalytic papers: Towards the development of common editorial standards’ (IJP 1998, 79: 431-48)) is grounded in a concern for the insecure foundations of psychoanalysis, which on the one hand ‘has been far from developing a means and methodology to have and to resolve debates by building an informed consensus’ and on the other has shown a ‘tendency to multiply schools and paradigms and to rely on rhetoric and argument by authority’ (p. 431).
A way to counter what has weakened our discipline is to give ‘greater formal attention to the development of a more rigorous culture of enquiry’ (p. 432), which—as regards written contributions—implies establishing a shared methodology of evaluating them.
While illustrating the methodological criteria to be applied in our discipline Tuckett insists on the issue of clarity and rigour as against the issue of ‘truth’ (p. 445): authors should be free to choose their own different ways of communicating what they want and of setting out their arguments, but they should seek to set out their viewpoint in the clearest and most rigorous way: ‘The emphasis is on asking how we know rather than what we know’ (p. 445).
The evaluation of the quality of a paper is strictly editorial: this means that, while examining a paper for publication, the evaluators should leave what the authors say somehow in the background and pay the greatest attention to the way in which the ideas are presented, how comprehensible they are, how well argued and how widely accessible to the various sub-groups of the psychoanalytic community.
The first requirement in practice is that evaluators abstain from selecting papers on grounds of personal agreement and disagreement. It is not the job of an evaluator to reach a personal opinion as to whether they like the argument. What an evaluator needs to be interested in is the argument the author offers and wheth