From Psychoanalytic Narrative to Empirical Single Case Research: Implications for Psychoanalytic Practice, by Horst Kächele, Joseph Schacter and Helmut Thomä.  Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York and London, 2009,  470 + xxv pp., $47.50

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This is an important book. Horst Kächele and Helmut Thomä, founding members of the Ulm Psychoanalytic Process Research Study Group, are classically trained psychoanalysts who spent four decades trying to determine how psychoanalysis works. In this volume, in collaboration with the American psychoanalysis Joseph Schachter, they pull together their essential ideas and research experience, with the aim of bridging the gap between clinical conviction and research evidence. Sisyphus may have and an easier task.

Psychoanalysis has survived for more than a century in large measure because individuals experienced themselves having been helped by psychoanalytic treatment (Elizabeth Rosenberg Zetzel, private communication). Since one learns how to do psychoanalysis by experiencing it from the perspective of the patient, clinicians tend to retain a lifelong conviction that it works; and they are bored with or even hostile to research into the process by which they may have been helped. They often—and wrongly—cite Freud's view that each psychoanalysis is its own research project, which is true enough, to support their aversion to empirical research into psychoanalytic process. The authors meet these colleagues on their own ground. They agree that scientific psychoanalysis must rest on the study of single treatments. They then demonstrate in painstaking and elegant detail how one takes the seemingly small but really large step from case narrative, the basic scientific method of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to single case research, the method of our own time.

Here they encounter another obstacle. They note that no one has ever demonstrated that psychoanalysis is a distinct m