You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Following a discussion of methodological questions concerning the problem of consensus in psychoanalysis (with special consideration of the arguments of Ricoeur and Lorenzer) and a critical survey of the literature, two relevant empirical investigations are reported. In the first of these, the protocols of fifty-five sessions of a psychoanalytic treatment case were rated by means of rating scales constructed to gauge the operation of anxiety concepts (shame anxiety, castration anxiety, guilt anxiety, separation anxiety). Three raters achieved average interrater agreement in line with values reported in the literature. In the second investigation, the session protocols were divided into separate patient utterances. After a careful selection procedure, forty such utterances crystallized. These were presented to twenty-five psychoanalysts and to forty-five laymen for evaluation with reference to concepts of anxiety. The fact that experts and laymen attained high inter- and intragroup agreement suggests that the operation of these concepts in the evaluation procedure makes preconceptions related to theory dispensable. It may be noted that the selection of text units was confirmed by