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One does not have to venture far into this book to grasp that it has great implications and consequence for the practice of psychoanalysis. Hinshelwood’s stated view is that ‘Psychoanalysis must move into the business of testing’, meaning testing its theories. The book has as its focus, the integration of two positions which are often in conflict within psychoanalytic literature: (a) is psychoanalysis a hermeneutic science? or (b) is it an empirical natural science? The author’s method is also absolutely clear – he returns to clinical psychoanalytic practice as the foundation of psychoanalytic knowledge and also the site of its examination and testing.
Hinshelwood’s book is an attempt to defend psychoanalysis as a ‘rigorous and evidenced body of knowledge’ (p. 2) and the rigour and thoroughness in his investigation is remarkable. It is also intended to give us a research method by which to objectively compare ‘the cacophony of differing views’ and methods within the analytic tradition. As you may have grasped thus far, the task Hinshelwood has set himself in this volume is a daunting one.
The book itself is divided into 22 chapters in 4 parts. The first part, covering 35 pages, sets the scene for some of the key challenges which psychoanalytic research has to encounter: the subjectivity of the field of observation; the problem of generalising from single-case studies; whether inductive thinking can be used to establish a scientific theory; and the problem of data collecting. It reviews social science approaches to the study of psychoanalytic theory and shows the ‘growing hegemony of “empirical” process research’ (p. 31) in contrast to an approach which sees the clinical process as the research process itself. He describes this latter position as giving back to the clinician the possibility ‘once more’ (p. 30) of joining up the actual work with a research perspective, and this is the position Hinshelwood supports, in pursuit of a ‘form of on-couch process research’. He