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This book is a final overview of the Menninger Foundation Psychotherapy Research Project (PRP). It is an extraordinary document, not surprisingly since it is the record of a unique piece of research carried out in unique circumstances.
The Menninger Foundation consists of a full-scale psychiatric hospital with in-patient and out-patient facilities and varieties of intermediate care, with a research establishment attached, entirely devoted to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Around 1950 a project was conceived for learning more about its work by examining in as much detail as possible the treatment of a group of patients and its result, from initial assessment, through their therapy or analysis to its termination, and on into the subsequent course of their lives. Of cardinal importance was the decision to make it a ‘naturalistic’ research project: to observe and assess the treatment as it was ordinarily conducted, with no variation of normal procedures for methodological reasons. So completely was this principle observed that neither patients nor therapists knew that they were included in such a study until the treatment came to its natural ending, at which point they were interviewed by the researchers.
This secrecy, ethically unacceptable today, is only one of many considerations which mean this study cannot be replicated. Indeed the book is historically fascinating for the incidental ways it reflects an attitude to psychoanalytic treatment in the therapeutic culture of the US in the 1950s. I doubt if whole families are so ready nowadays to uproot themselves and settle for years in a different part of the country, so that somebody can have psychoanalysis. The Menninger Foundation is the only place of its kind, of course, and a very prestigious place to be treated. Even so, one gets clues to the idealisation of analytic treatment, not in the investigators so much as in American society at large, which is being paid for in its relative derogation today.