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.
In this issue of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Boesky (2002) examines our failure to teach—or even at times to consider—the methodology of clinical evidence, and he proposes a format for doing so. In his seminar at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, candidates are asked to formulate a hypothesis, derived from one of their own psychoanalytic cases, and to report whatever clinical evidence supports that hypothesis. While this deceptively simple exercise would appear to be a fruitful one for any psychoanalyst, at any level of experience and from any theoretical perspective, it underscores our belief that it is only in the careful observation and self-examination of the analyst's mind at work that we will make further progress in refining our methods.
Toward that end, all the major psychoanalytic journals seem to be converging on protocols that might further this goal. To name a few, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association is embarking on a book series in which analysts will present and comment on each other's clinical material; and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis has recently instituted a new format, “The Analyst at Work,” based on a proposal I submitted several years ago, in which analysts are invited to present clinical material, filling in as much of their own internal processes as possible.
While none of these efforts is directly related to Boesky's proposal, they all suggest a more concerted interest in addressing in our journals both clinical methodology and the methodology of clinical discourse. As the Quarterly now joins these ventures, it is my hope that we may begin to develop a more precise dialogue among analysts of differing schools of thought. Thus armed with a degree of detail not usually found in our journals, we might discover not only the expected wide variations in the way individual