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Analysts are very fond of ‘big’ theories, broad frameworks within which they can organise and account for their clinical experience. The shortcomings and hazards of this kind of approach are well known not least in the ways that expectations can lead to distortions of what is actually observed. Nonetheless the attractions remain compelling. In part this may be defensive, a consequence of analysts' exposure to uncertainty and doubt about the meaning and implications of patients' communications. This may be coupled with the reserve and isolation that an analytic attitude necessitates, which may tempt analysts to seek to contain and orientate themselves, by recourse to the kinds of structures that theory can appear to offer.
Alongside of this there has been an historic suspicion of extra-analytic and especially empirical research conducted outside of clinical sessions, which is often represented as in some way none, or even anti, analytic. There is something disingenuous about this, because analysis borrows freely, and it must be said often selectively, from research in other disciplines, where it is felt to support ‘analytic’ ideas. This essentially ambivalent approach often deters analysts from engaging in research that is capable of providing reliable ways of cross-referencing and triangulating the essentially subjectively experienced material which is the stuff of analysts' field of inquiry. Having said this, the need for this kind of approach is implicitly recognised, for example in need for clinical supervision and elsewhere, with tools such as Bion's ‘Grid’, which he explicitly states is only for use outside of sessions and for reviewing their content in a systematic fashion.
In Knox and Lepper's paper (both analysts who trained at the Society of Analytical Psychology) they describe their own extra-analytic researches into therapist/patient interactions, before going on to describe the ways in which this may have implications for how we think about, understand and