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M. Edelson's (1986) guidelines for scientific, qualitative, single-subject research on psychoanalytic hypotheses are applied to a 41-year-old spousally bereaved woman in short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. These guidelines call for a clear statement of the formulation to be tested, separation of facts from interpretations, and confrontation of at least one
Work on this article was supported by the Program on Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The formulations presented in this article were partly developed by a group of clinicians. In addition to the authors, the members of this group were Rebecca Bauknight, Reed Brockbank, Mary Ewert, Nigel Field, Norman Mages, Steven Reidbord, Alan Skolnikoff, and Michael Windholz. We wish to thank Charles Fisher, Charles Spezzano, Jonathan Dunn, and Joanne Greer for comments on a draft of the article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bram Fridhandler, PhD, Outpatient Mental Health Clinic, California Pacific Medical Center, 2323 Sacramento Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, California 94115. Electronic mail may be sent to fridhan@itsa.ucsf.edu.
plausible alternative explanation. Using therapy transcripts, the authors evaluate a grief-as-self-punishment proposition, which holds that guilt was causal in prolonging the subject's grief. Following M. Edelson, possible observations are specified that would disconfirm the proposition and account for conflicting observations that did occur. An alternative explanation is offered: The subject's grief was simply the result of multiple losses. The superiority of the explanation attributing a causal role to guilt is argued. The authors discuss the generalizability of their findings and the implications for future studies of psychodynamic hypotheses.