The following abstracts are edited versions of English summaries which appeared in Forum and are published with the permission of the journal.

Psychoanalytic hypotheses, like other scientific hypotheses, should be testable within a methodological framework which is in accordance with general scientific principles. In this paper these principles are presented and related to unconscious conflict as the core of psychoanalytic work. In psychoanalytically oriented therapy research the problem of generalizability of findings has been solved hitherto by combining qualitative-descriptive with quantitative-statistical methodologies. In contrast to this way of proceeding, the authors of this paper present a unified methodological concept: single cases are systematically compared with each other, so that evolving typical patterns of effects can be described. The procedure of a study following this concept of research is exemplified.