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I was privileged to have been taught by Jacob Arlow and later to have participated on panels, conferences, and in private discussions with him. During the 1980s, I spent three days at the University of California, San Francisco, with him and others in a research laboratory, listening to case recordings from an investigative project that was designed to provide rigor in the process of how we understand clinical data. This exercise permitted me to see him and others firsthand as he used clinical sequences to piece together larger units of meaning derived from verbal exchanges.
Arlow was expert at seeing the themes and derivatives of unconscious processes as they emerged in therapeutic talk. Indeed, his mantra, repeated by his disciples and others in the tradition, was the careful scrutiny of clinical process. He believed strongly that by scrupulous attention to the data of analysis, we could resolve differences in our views of what has happened and our understanding of the deeper meaning of the patient's productions. Thus, he held that psychoanalysis was an empirical science. Today we hear similar argument from Dale Boesky, Charles Brenner, and