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This panel explored the nature of clinical research, which was defined as that which relies on the use of the psychoanalytic method to make new discoveries. It uses no instruments or forms. Despite its centrality to psychoanalytic knowledge and its daily presence in the practice of many analysts, its methods have been neglected. The importance to psychoanalysis of being able to use the methods of clinical research was emphasized.
Each of the three presenters examined a recently published psychoanalytic paper to identify the methods of clinical research and their strengths and weakness. The papers provided the elements necessary to the panel's aims. The moderator thanked the authors for their generosity. The main ideas of the three papers were given but they were not the focus of the panel per se.
First, Anna Ursula Dreher considered Thomas Ogden's (2010) On three forms of thinking: Magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking. Its thesis is that psychoanalysis has advanced by shifting from the symbolic meaning of dream, play and associations to an exploration of the kind of mental processes involved in different types of thinking: a shift from what patients think to how they think. Dreher said that much follows from the way that psychoanalysis sits between nature (biology) and culture. Ogden's paper is an example of a long-established, holistic, ‘all-inclusive’ and valuable type of clinical research which interweaves empirical, conceptual and theoretical components. One of the tasks of clinical research is to find a way of giving others some access to what occurs in the essentially private context in which analytic discoveries are made, and to set out the line of the author's inferences. Ogden's thesis privileges the mode of reverie as a way of working. Dreher asked how this claim might be evaluated. She considered the correspondence, coherence and pragmatic criterions of truth and gave a picture of clinical research as a loosely organized, multifacet