You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To approach the issues raised in the five articles offered in this issue, I must first establish my own historical view of whether it is possible to study dynamic psychoanalytic psychotherapy with existing methods and measurement scales and to determine if such study provides a better scientific answer to the question of what makes the patient better, more adaptive as well as less symptomatic. The queries are as old as psychoanalysis itself and derive from Freud’s (1893–1895) eager attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a cure for hysteria. Indeed, what became of that enterprise is a huge edifice of psychoanalytic theory and a new theory of mind that has dominated a century of Western thought, and may even be bigger than the therapeutic question. Nonetheless, the treatment was born out of an attempt to change people and help them lose their symptoms—this is what occupies us in this issue. Let me answer, with a cautious statement, that I believe it is possible to study psychoanalytic treatments to some limited extent, and that the enterprise is worthwhile, as well as socially responsible and professionally necessary in a world seeking evidence-based treatments.
The therapy known as psychoanalysis has developed and changed over time and spawned many who have offered variations in the approach. To some, these new treatments are no longer recognized as psychoanalytic; others lie close enough to the core ideas to qualify as variant forms within the primal corpus. This more conservative, but also varied, group has not always been willing to join those studying the more behavioral treatments in solving hard empirical queries of what works for whom. This issue is an important attempt to gather together those serious about such questions who have accomplished a research corpus that I now scrutinize for their contribution to the hard questions raised.
Freud (1893–1895, 1894), himself, provoked the queries concerning what works, even in his earliest papers. He indica