Discussion

IN MANY FIELDS, A TENSION EXISTS between researchers and practitioners, the practitioners contemptuously labeling the researchers as bean counters and the researchers returning the compliment in referring to practitioners as too unintellectual to appreciate the purity of science. For many years within psychoanalysis the tilt was so great that little reputable research existed outside the clinical endeavor. The core object of psychoanalytic study, the unconscious, was reachable only in transference-driven dreams and associations kept uncontaminated by the analyst's neutrality and abstinence. With a shift from an almost exclusive focus on unconscious fantasy to object relations and intersubjectivity, the object of study shifted to aspects of self with other and transference—countertransference transactions opening the way to limited statistical research within the field (Luborsky and Crits-Christoph, 1989; Weiss and Sampson, 1986) using data of the consulting room. In the meantime a large body of observational, experimental, and statistical research was taking place outside the consulting room. I have summarized much of this research (Lichtenberg, 1983, 1985) and its relationship to psychoanalysis. This volume and the one that precedes it draw on another now vast complex body of research derived from Bowlby's concept of attachment. Until very recently, psychoanalysts, with a few exceptions, have been reluctant to draw on this potentially valuable source of information. While a wave of interest has risen, tensions exist between the two fields that create a border area for creative exploration. In our previous volume we considered gaps between attachment's focus on predictability and psychoanalysis's focus on transformation as well as attachment's concern with categories and psychoanalytic concern