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The strength of psychoanalysis as a form of research and as a therapy derives from its detailed, long-term work with individuals; small numbers of self-selected individuals are seen over the course of any analytic
lifetime. In spite of its strengths, these features make psychoanalysis ill suited to test therapeutic propositions across samples or populations. But increasingly those who make the decisions about what to provide in publicly-funded or insurance-funded health services require evidence about a treatment's effectiveness, and as well that evidence should take a specific form: it must come from controlled trials in which samples or populations of subjects representative of the whole have been randomly allocated to different treatment conditions. This requirement has been a serious challenge for those who wish to maintain levels of public investment in the provision of psychoanalytic forms of therapy and its presence and status in academic stages of training and research.
In response, and without too much fanfare, several European centres have been engaged in the costly, time-consuming and challenging task of research into the outcome of medium or longer-term psychoanalytic treatments of patients suffering from depression. Why depression? Well, as Ulrich Bahrke and Johannes Kaufhold of Frankfurt, the first presenters to this Panel said, depression is up there amongst the most significant causes of human illness and disability.
None of the studies presented at the Panel are yet in a position to publish their outcome findings. But over the next two or three years each will do so. A substantial body of findings about patients with depression and the value of psychoanalytic treatments will then enter the public sphere. Whatever the direction of these findings, positive or negativ