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This book is a collection of papers by leading American clinicians and researchers. It is cleverly organized as it becomes a forum for discussion about the relationship between psychotherapy practice and psychotherapy research. Its main theme is the split between the two disciplines and the ongoing debate about the difficulty in making scientific enquiry about clinical issues that are known more ‘intuitively’ than intellectually.
In the first part of the book, psychoanalysts discuss and describe their views and concerns in relation to the split. Among them, Jay Greenberg states that ‘the gap between psychotherapy research and clinicians resists closure and threatens to widen’. He argues that it cannot be otherwise since they observe things from different perspectives and he takes to task the empiricist position of philosophers of science such as Grunbaun and his critique of psychoanalysis, that scientific procedures which are designed to establish validity, reliability, specific observational conditions and replicability cannot be applied to data collected by the analytic model. The relationship that develops is one in which therapists are insiders and researchers are sceptical outsiders.
Edelson creates a dialogue between himself and a researcher to illustrate the complexity of the psychoanalytic process. He views the case study as the patient's story and develops the idea of a corresponding unconscious ‘master story’. Within this study framework he illustrates that his enquiry does not preclude the formulation and testing of specific hypotheses, through noting significant observations within the here and now that would falsify his hypothesis.
Donald Spence criticizes researchers for failing to ask the hard questions that strike at the heart of psychoanalysis, that is the belief in the dynamic unconscious whose access can be gained through free