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This monograph reports on an experimental study replete with statistical analyses, a carefully prepared methodology, and precisely defined hypotheses to be tested. Its value is admittedly limited by the smallness of the sample (material drawn from four cases), but
its major faults derive from the incorrect or inadequate theoretical and clinical understanding underlying the approach.
The material studied came from typescripts of tape recordings or filmed records of two analyses and two psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapies. The verbal responses of patients in the five minutes following an intervention, considered to be an interpretation by a consensus of objective evaluators, were compared with the five minutes of responses which followed a noninterpretive intervention offered earlier in the same therapy session. While the authors were aware of the probable relevance of nonverbal responses and of the contribution made to any communication by tone of voice, nuances of timing, accent, gesture, and the like, they regretted that their technique could not record or measure such variables.
More critical is the omission of any reference to the preceding therapeutic developments or extra-analytic life experiences related to the session and the interventions studied, and to the content and transference significance of the material under discussion—in short, to all of the phenomena we have in mind when we note that responses to interpretations are overdetermined. In the evaluation procedures concerning the interpretations described, the entire question of correctness, 'hierarchy, timing and wording' of interpretations (Loewenstein) is bypassed. Nevertheless, the authors consider the study to be a valid testing of a number of hypotheses.
Ernst Kris often pointed out that an awareness of the historical evolution of psychoanalytic theory was helpful in assessing the bias and orientation implicit in a formulation, enabling us to understand problems encountered in a repor