The research strategies employed in psychoanalysis and in academic psychological empiricism are, on the whole, still quite divergent from one another, although efforts have been made over the past few decades to introduce some degree of coordination and interrelationship. One cause of the difference to be detected lies in the diametrically distinct methodologies of the two disciplines: the one is characterized by (deep-layer) hermeneutics, the other by positivistic scientific investigation; the one relies for its insights on the individual clinical case study, the other on experimental design based on large numbers of cases.

Attempts by psychoanalysts to build bridges (in medical research, for example) have all too often meant that, at best, only parts of their complex theories have been incorporated into research designs and that these fragments have yet to be verified by a methodology that remains foreign to the object of psychoanalysis—the unconscious. For