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It is admittedly easier to train someone to assume the role of researcher than it is to train him to do research. The psychoanalytic researcher does research in psychoanalysis rather than presume to define acceptable methodology in isolation from the problems presented by data.
Freud's remark about methodologists-“forever polishing their glasses, but never looking through them”—reflects the continuing state of concern with what Langer (1967) calls “idolatry.” There is an ever growing jargon: “language more tenchnical than the ideas it serves.” There is “prescriptive methodology,” with canons of procedure such as “isolated, controllable, repeatable, objective.” “It is with the dawn of feeling that the domain of biology yields psychology,” writes Langer; she defines “subjective” as whatever is felt as action and “objective” as merely whatever is felt as impact-thereby exposing objectivity as an idol. It is the pursuit of such idols, she suggests, that makes the harvest of laboratory psychology so meager in comparison with other biological sciences.
The search for a “true” methodology must proceed, of course. Such a methodology recognizes the value of a “permanent image that one can resort to … to recover an elusive