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This study reports the course and outcome of a psychosomatic research project in which an effort to use psychoanalysis as the principle research tool was adversely influenced by the special requirements of the experimental approach. This multidisciplinary study of the asthma syndrome had as its focus a young, covertly depressed male asthmatic, whose symptoms, while uninfluenced by prolonged desensitization, were not accompanied by irreversible physical changes. Passively accepting the recommendation of analysis and aware of his involvement in a research project requiring tape recordings and repeated laboratory procedures, he sustained for over two years his resistance to the analytic process and the concept of psychic conflict, withdrawing from analysis when organic therapy was again available. Two important influencing factors could be delineated, parameters and contaminants. The parameters were: 1, nonpayment of fee; 2, the hospital setting in which were combined the physiological and analytic investigations; 3, the laboratory manipulations themselves; 4, the interaction with an experimental team of persons rather than with a single analyst. More important, however, were the contaminants: 1, analysis used as a research instrument; 2, selection of a patient because he has a symptom rather than because he seeks help with a problem; 3, subsidy of the analysis by a grant-in-aid; 4, recording of the analysis; 5, multiplicity of parameters. The patient had to compete with the research goal for attention. He split his transference reactions and objects among the several members of the project. The uncertainty of the length of subsidy of his analysis furnished a reality re-enforcement of strong resistances. Recording of his verbal productions underscored his infantile notions about the magic of words and the threatening omniscience of parental figures, lending a real basis to his suspicions of the analyst. The analyst found himself only one of many figures dea