How to do Research? Reply to Otto Kernberg1

How can one not agree with Otto Kernberg on the essential issue, namely, that it is necessary for us as psychoanalysts to develop research activities?

It seems to me equally necessary, however, to be clear about the objectives and the methods. What are we to understand by ‘research’ and ‘science’ (since it is readily added that this research must be ‘scientific’)? In other words, on what epistemological grounds can we define our aims and our methods without renouncing psychoanalysis itself? Otto Kernberg contrasts the more ‘philosophical and subjectivist’ attitude of Latin countries with the preference for empirical studies which are said to be characteristic of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries. He may be right, though I do not think that in saying this he means to oppose an ‘old Europe’, nostalgic for its past and given to meditation without practical usefulness, with more pragmatic, in short, more efficient countries. One cannot say that, or else one would have to accept that the passionate discussions that animated Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and a few others in the 1920s were only ‘philosophical’. They were scientific, because they were the very basis of the whole of quantum physics.

Otto Kernberg rightly emphasizes the need to distinguish between two types of research: on the one hand, research which aims to evaluate the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatments and of psychotherapeutic techniques inspired by psychoanalysis; and, on the other, research which concerns the psychoanalytic process, that is to say, the patient's psychic processes and their transformations in the conscious/unconscious metabolism, the patient-analyst interactions, etc., in the basic couch-armchair setting. In other domains, the latter would be designated as ‘fundamental research’ activities, while the former would be regarded more as ‘applied research’, or even ‘research-development’. The distinction is necessary. It needs to be remembered, though, that, within the very c