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This book is not the usual book psychoanalysts read. It is a series of papers that take basic analytic hypotheses or assumptions and place them in the strict laboratory of statistical replication. This opens the possibility of prediction. The papers cover a multitude of areas, from questioning psychoanalytic explanations of infant and childhood development, to orality, depression, character style, and the individual in the group. This is a rich range of subjects that interest psychoanalysts. Habituated to narrative clinical papers through which we can engage in a patient's life, we are now in a world of video tapes, equations, and graphs. This adds a dimension of veridical comfort. After a day of clinical work, we know that bonding works, that our interventions with empathy have an effect, and the narrative theme of a patient can fit into a “theory” when we wish to place him in one; however, we still enjoy the emergence of aliveness and freshness.
Psychoanalysts are also buffeted by the nagging reproach: “Are you scientific?” Philosophers of science write books questioning this. We are relegated to the teleological rather than the epistemological. We respond with the hermeneutic and the heuristic to counter negative onslaughts. We recall Kuhn's (1971) comment, “Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand we shall need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it.” When we review the laboratory work on psychoanalytic theories, we are reminded that, “There are, according to Jaspers no causal connections between mental phenomena, they only emerge from one another. Causal connections exist exclusively between physical events and such connections provide us with explanations. The term ‘understanding’ is reserved for the ‘mental sphere’” (Taylor, 1985).
In this book, the opening “Testing Analytic Explanations” by Weiss and Sampson is an excellent overview of the need f