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September 26, 1967. SOME ASPECTS OF THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE. Dr. Jacob A. Arlow's Section of the Ernst Kris Study Group.
Dr. Mortimer J. Blumenthal described the progress of the Study group. Consideration of what analysts mean by, and require as, satisfactory evidence for interpretation in clinical situations, led to questions about analytic theory, scientific methodology, and how the analyst thinks about clinical data. While psychoanalysis need not be identical in model or methodology with other sciences, it should be possible to share psychoanalytic knowledge with the rest of the scientific community. A frequent criticism of psychoanalytic methodology has been that there is no consistent set of rules for making interpretations and that this permits varying and contradictory inferences from the same data. However difficult it is to make explicit the clarifying, simplifying, and abstract principles, the Study group found they could arrive at a common conclusion in examining clinical data; alternative methods of evaluating the data would also be valuable in establishing the validity of interpretations. There remains the need to clarify and order the conceptual foundations of psychoanalysis.