In the summer of 1985, researchers from academic settings in the United States and West Germany gathered in Hamburg for their Eighth Workshop on Empirical Research in Psychoanalysis. One valuable outcome is this account of progress made in eighteen research projects that focused upon clinical data from psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy.

Close reading will reward the psychoanalytic clinician interested in respectable validation and correction of theory through accepted scientific method. Yet to slog through information dense with statistics, acronyms, and references to crucial technical detail elsewhere described is a daunting journey.

Hartvig Dahl's introduction helps in mapping the methods, strategies, and focuses of the contributors, as do the latter themselves as they compare and contrast their data with those of the other researchers. These multiple perspectives provide the reader with a clear sense of the knowledge gained by the relatively small handful (32) of contributors.