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The subtitle announces that in many respects psychoanalytic social research differs from the psychoanalysis of an individual.
Dr. Hendin is known for his study of suicide in Scandinavia. He and his collaborators have published a condensation of five interviews with each of twelve hospital nurses, chosen by lot and remunerated for their time spent and the information they gave to further the research project. Each nurse was initially instructed that the interviewers '… wished to get as complete a picture of her as possible, and that it would be best if she told about herself in her own way'.
This method has been applied, with some advantage, in work with primitive people living in a more or less homogeneous society. The responses are useful to the degree that they can be translated into their unconscious implications. As an example,
Miss H was a slender, moderately pretty girl of twenty-two. The very first comment written by the interviewer was his impression of her as an obedient little girl, and it proved to be prophetic. Miss H cultivated and exploited the little-girl role. It colored most of her adaptive maneuvers… Miss H had difficulty with free-associating from the start. When she did get going, she immediately got onto a current problem, a love affair which had reached an obstacle because of a difference in religion (p. 73).
The method leaves necessarily many unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions, problems with which anyone who has done