Panel Report, IPA Congress Boston 2015: Working Parties Today III: Methods and findings from Comparative Clinical Methods (CCM) and Initiating Psychoanalysis (WPIP)

Dr. Bill Glover opened with a brief description of the history of the Working Parties, emphasizing their significant contributions to clinical research and professional development. To date over 1,000 IPA analysts and candidates have participated in the intensive clinical groups held by the Working Parties to collect data for their research.

In the first paper, Dr. Bernard Reith began with a brief discussion of the history and goals of the Working Parties before delving more deeply into the work of the Working Party on Initiating Psychoanalysis (WPIP), one of several Working Parties formed in Europe in 2001 by the EPF's European Scientific Initiative. The aim of the initiative was to investigate how groups of psychoanalysts from diverse analytic cultures could be used to learn more about the “clinical realities of psychoanalysis.” Sharing a common spirit of psychoanalytic investigation, the Working Parties have developed different methodologies, ranging from structured (CCM-Comparative Clinical Methods) to purely free-associative (SPPT-Working Party on the Specificity of Psychoanalytic Treatment Today). The WPIP method is semi-structured in order to reach a “meta” perspective whereby unexpected aspects of clinical material can freely emerge. The group's task is straight forward - to respond to a few discussion questions and to justify their observations by referring to clinical material from process notes from first analytic sessions. Dr. Reith noted that this approach is quite successful in allowing for a creative synthesis of free-association and secondary process work, as well as a shared third-person perspective on the diverse responses to the clinical material presented.

Dr. Reith described the WPIP research method consisting of three complimentary parts or steps: 1) the analytic couple working together in the original interview; 2) the