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This is a timely and useful book, particularly as it comes at a moment when psychoanalysis is increasingly attempting to enhance its body of knowledge through formal research. The book's basic argument is that if one is to do meaningful psychoanalytic research, one must be clear about the analytic nature of the concepts being studied, and that the investigative methods capture their analytic meaning. This seems self-evident and beyond question. Unfortunately, it is honored more in the exception than the rule.
Foundations for Conceptual Research in Psychoanalysis is divided into an introduction and six chapters. The introduction and first chapter take up the nature of psychoanalytic research; theoretical change and scientific progress; and the meanings of “conceptual” and “empirical” orientations, as well as their foundations in the history and philosophy of science. Readers not already well versed in philosophical foundations might find the presentation here a bit complex, while more informed readers may consider it a bit limited, but nevertheless, this beginning serves as a strong foundation for what follows.
The second chapter explores Freud's view of the conjunction between treatment and research, and in so doing, makes critical inquiry into the nature and consequences of research strategies, methodologies, and data. The third chapter illustrates the significance of conceptual research in relation to the paradigm of quantitative psychotherapy research as a general example, and in relation to research about transference and countertransference in particular. Here Dreher shows that some questions cannot be answered by empirical methods alone because they are based on conceptual differences. She carefully examines the conceptual foundation and structure of Luborsky's CCRT, a quantitative research method widely represented as a measure of transference, and demonstrates that, in actuality, what CCRT measures hardly corresponds to the psychoanalytic meaning