You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Sirs,
We read with much interest the recent discussion between Wallerstein (2005a, 2005b) and Green (2005), and the subsequent responses (Epstein, 2005; Wallerstein, 2005c). In our opinion, this discussion is indeed urgently needed, as these issues are likely to determine the future of psychoanalysis both as a science and as a profession.
More precisely, this discussion touches upon two distinctions that are central in this debate: 1) between a nomothetic stance—aimed at generating probabilistic laws concerning human behaviour—and an idiographic stance—focused on understanding and explaining an individual case; and 2) between a more interpretive or intuitive or, for that matter, more clinical approach, and a more neo-positivistic, explanatory approach. Luyten et al. (in press) discuss these distinctions within psychoanalysis and argue that the juxtaposition of these approaches is not only unfruitful, but also, to a large extent, false. Any scientific endeavour involves interpretation, as any interpretation should involve testing ideas in a systematic way. In addition, psychoanalytic research should be about developing empirically based rules for translating nomothetic knowledge to individual cases as well as about the reverse process of taking observations in an individual case to establish the generality of these observations and the conditions for possible exceptions to nomothetic principles. In fact, we have argued that research should always involve such nomothetic-idiographic-nomothetic cycles, combining group designs with (multiple) case studies, to test and refine nomothetic knowledge at the level of individual cases, which can then be tested again in group designs and so on. To refer to such nomothetically derived clinical theories about the etiogenesis of psychopathology and the clinical process, we have coined the term ‘master narratives’ and have examined how these help in understanding the particular idiosyncratic narrative of a given patient as well