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In the opening chapter I described the background to the project’s inception, the early experiences of enthusiasm, the somewhat unexpected emotional and conceptual difficulties we then encountered and the outlines of the way we came to approach them. Our experiences in Brussels, Prague and Sorrento have now been described in some detail. They demonstrated to us that it was no simple matter to arrange workshop groups that would be able to discuss psychoanalytical clinical material and to arrive at rigorous comparisons of different approaches. With hindsight our reflections on the difficulties we were forced into after Sorrento have turned out to be critical. They took place initially in the two meetings of the working party in Paris in September 2003 and February 2004, backed up and briefed by some exploratory qualitative research. But they were also to be ongoing as we used the new EPF working party structure to meet two or three times a year to try to analyse and compare what had been happening at the workshops themselves.
In those meetings in 2003 and 2004 we were faced with conceptual and emotional issues which were largely a function of the very difficulties the comparative clinical methods project had been designed to address: namely the problem of managing difference and making comparisons between psychoanalysts and within psychoanalytic institutions and the lack of easily applied frameworks to define when work is psychoanalytic (of a particular type), except via the traditional routes of appeal to charisma and authority. We came
out of those 2003 and 2004 meetings with the outline of the specialized discussion method - the two-step method - which is the main focus of this book.
In this chapter I will describe the development of the new method and also say something about how and why it has evolved subsequently, trying to draw out some elements of its core epistemological assumptions.
I should note, however, that the two-step method was never intended to be a