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This is the second publication to issue from the activities of the
Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund,1 a foundation whose purpose is sponsorship of research and education in psychoanalysis. The present work resulted from the discussions of a study group that met thirty-five times between 1964 and 1968. Members included Mortimer Ostow, Peter Blos, Sr., Sidney Furst, George Gero, Mark Kanzer, Daniel Silverman, Richard Sterba, Arthur Valenstein, Jacob A. Arlow, Earl Loomis, and Ernest Rappaport. The book is divided into three sections: an Introduction which describes the method used; Part I, which presents theoretical formulations derived from group discussion of case histories; and Part II, which contains six of the eight case histories discussed by the group.
In the Introduction, Ostow sets forth some of the problems encountered in attempting to use psychoanalysis as a research tool. He describes the relative isolation of each psychoanalyst in his consulting room and the resulting relative lack of corroboration of his own opinions by colleagues, the relative paucity of reproducible data derived from the observation of large numbers of patients, and the problems of data gathering. This group used session-by-session clinical records for a significant portion of each case they discussed. The members had agreed to meet together about once monthly during the academic year for a period of four or five years with a 'view toward achieving new and original insights'. In addition to the eight cases formally discussed, vignettes from the analytic experience of the participants were presented, so that thirty to forty cases were considered during the five-year period. All discussions were taped and transcripts were distributed to the participants.
The group chose to define perversion as Freud had in his Three Essays