Will the Real Psychoanalysis Please Stand Up: Commentary on Paper by Michael J. Bader and the Three Responses to It*

Michael Bader's (1998) essay seems important to me. To evaluate its importance, we have to recognize that his argument is not simply about being empirical but about being empirical in a very specific way: Form hypotheses, based on an understanding of the patient's psychology, about what the best intervention will be at the moment; try the intervention; observe the patient's reactions for signs that the intervention was analytically useful or not; don't leave any of that out when writing up the case; create a literature in which we accumulate patient-specific criteria for guiding our choice of interventions; don't write papers about interventions or ways of working that are not linked to these patient-specific criteria; don't imply that we cannot do any of the above; accept certain of the patient's responses to an intervention as adequate evidence that the analyst's hypotheses that informed the intervention constitute true understanding of the patient's psychology; stop “privileging” the analyst's inner experience and get on with the work of observing how our interpretations affect the patient; don't say you want to privilege both the analyst's subjectivity and the patient's subjectivity. About the last point, I wonder, as Renik (1998) did in his response to Bader, why we can't do both, but I also recognize that Bader is saying: “Well, you simply haven't done both; instead, those of you who have become