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The general body of knowledge that is psychoanalysis depends upon the findings of the activity we know as clinical research. Namely, it is the result of an examination of the thoughts and behaviours of analysands,
and of the interactions between each of them and their analyst, which the setting of a psychoanalytic treatment permits. However, compared to the central importance of clinical research as the means by which we arrive at psychoanalytic discoveries, we pay little attention to the nature of its epistemological procedures and methods of argument: those modes of thought and intuition which we deploy in order to arrive at findings of universal application to understanding the human personality, and to distinguish these from others which are idiosyncratic or adventitious artifacts. How do we tell psychoanalytic fact from fictions? Or true advance from what is simply a rephrasing of a previously recognised phenomena? It is to be presumed that there are valid grounds for our belief that these judgements are possible. But when we try to say what they might be, we often struggle.
This panel, from members of the IPA's Clinical Research Sub-Committee, explored the processes which might be involved in the logic of psychoanalytic clinical research. It hoped to stimulate a discussion about clinical research by offering its audience a specimen for its dissection.
In his prologue, Donald Moss, the Panel's chair, spoke of one of the fundamental problems which needs to be recognized when considering our kind of research. It appears to be characteristic of language use, and analytic research is intricately dependent upon language. “We are all interpreters”, he said. In respect of much the same thing, we may have quite different conceptions from our fellows, while still using the same word. Alternately, we may use quite different terms while referring to more or