A Quantitative Study of a Psychoanalysis

The widespread uneasiness among psychoanalysts about the current status and the future of our profession is largely based, I believe, on our failure to redeem the promise of psychoanalysis as a science. We must start fulfilling that promise in a more basic way than we have generally recognized, by revising our very methods of collecting data. I am convinced that we must begin by audio-recording psychoanalyses, to eliminate the unsystematic and unspecified selection procedures involved in note-taking, as well as the errors resulting from our fallible memories. Moreover, I assume that we need to make our data public, in the sense that analysts other than ourselves can have access to the fine details of what each has heard and responded to in private. I cannot accept Meissner's (1966) position that this is a pointless task because the real data are by nature private-that is, subjective experiences of analysands and analysts. If it is really true that the words used by analyst and patient do not significantly inform us about the analytic process, then we might as well forget about our scientific development. Gill et al. (1968) have cogently stated the important arguments for recording.

But recording alone is only a beginning. What we need even more is a whole new approach to the study of analyses. We cannot live off the genius of Freud forever, nor off the second generation of truly gifted and creative clinicians upon whose insights we still feed but whom we have begun to lose. All current signs point to a steady decline in creative innovation and fresh clinical insights. In short, it can be said, and I believe most analysts would agree, that there is a powerful need for new life, new blood, new students with fire and creative imagination. By all the signs, this hope is forlorn unless the field of psychoanalysis is reinvigorated by some fundamentally new feature that will attract creative men and women.