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Among the few ideas that would probably unite psychoanalysts of all persuasions is that our field has been woefully deficient in its attention to the role of research in clinical practice. These two excellent volumes, one a manual of the principles of supportive-expressive (SE), that is, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and the other a rigorous treatise on the rules of scientific evidence in psychoanalysis, are a most welcome sign that times are changing.
The two books are very different from each other. Luborsky's manual describes psychoanalytic psychotherapy, derived from “the psychoanalytic theory of psychotherapeutic change” (p. 15), as we find it in the writings of Freud, Fenichel, Bibring, and other “classical” analysts. It also rests on sophisticated clinical research into the symptom context in a single case that Luborsky has steadfastly pursued in spite of his own earlier pessimistic assessment that “research was not influencing clinical practice” (p. xxii). Luborsky's manual contains an appendix that plunges us into an excerpt from a session transcript and invites us to score it in prepared psychoanalytic categories. Edelson's book, by contrast, openly avoids the use of clinical vignettes, which so many theoretical papers have found obligatory, because they are “likely to disturb concentration the the argument itself and … to be misleading, even when illustrative, for they derive their viewpoint from a