Editorial

Research and psychoanalysis have not enjoyed a comfortable relationship. However, given the current climate in the public health sector they need to become better acquainted with each other because evidence-based practice, as a primary driver in healthcare, is here to stay. We have to engage with the demand this places on us as providers of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and demonstrate that what we offer can make a distinctive, effective contribution to public mental health. The demand for public accountability urges us, with unprecedented force, to consider whether we want the psychoanalytic body of knowledge and its applications to be a relic of historical interest or at the cutting edge of mental health care.

Engagement with this demand requires that we try out different ways of doing things, which may feel alien to established practice (e.g. session-by-session outcome monitoring), and to many may seem altogether irrelevant to what transpires in the therapeutic situation. Arguably this also requires that we actively respond to this external culture from a vantage point that is distinctively psychoanalytic and practice-based so that we are not just ‘complying’ with what we feel is imposed on us (although sometimes we have to do that too, of necessity), but rather we also contribute to the discourse about the varieties of scientific research, and the contributions and limitations of different kinds of methodologies.

All knowledge is subject to both rational and irrational forces. It is vital to counter some of the more simplistic notions about the status of scientific findings. Equally, however, if all knowledge is vulnerable to unconscious forces this alerts us to the fact that our ‘clinical knowledge’ is similarly compromised so that from whatever perspective we approach the task of ‘understanding’ a phenomenon, we invariably need another perspective to act as a kind of corrective. Research can provide one such ‘other’ perspective for the clinician, just as the cli