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Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber & Tamara Fischmann
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, October 2006, Vol. 87, No. 5: 1355 – 86.
The development of psychoanalysis as a science and clinical practice has always relied heavily on various forms of conceptual research. Thus, conceptual research has clarified, formulated and reformulated psychoanalytic concepts permitting to better shape the findings emerging in the clinical setting. By enhancing clarity and explicitness in concept usage it has facilitated the integration of existing psychoanalytic thinking as well as the development of new ways of looking at clinical and extra-clinical data. Moreover, it has offered conceptual bridges to neighbouring disciplines particularly interested in psychoanalysis, such as philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, history of art and literature and, more recently, cognitive science/neuroscience. In the present phase of psychoanalytic pluralism, of worldwide scientific communication among psychoanalysts irrespective of language differences and furthermore of an intensifying dialogue with other disciplines, the relevance of conceptual research is steadily increasing. However, it still often seems insufficiently clear how conceptual research can be differentiated from clinical and empirical research in psychoanalysis. Therefore, the IPA's Subcommittee for Conceptual Research presents in this paper some of its considerations of the similarities and differences between various forms of clinical and extra-clinical research, their specific aims, their quality criteria and thus their specific chances as well as their specific limitations. Examples taken from six issues of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 2002 – 3 serve as illustrations for seven different subtypes of conceptual research.