Lives, Events, And Other Players: Directions in Psychohistory. Volume  4, Downstate Psychoanalytic Institute 25Th Anniversary Series. Mark Kanzer (Series Ed.) and Joseph T. Coltrera (Vol.  4 Ed.). New York:  Jason Aronson, 1981,  x + 320 pp..

There has always been an epistemological problem at the heart of psychoanalysis. How do we analysts know what we say we know? In the clinical setting we piece together fragments of associations, dreams, memories, and parapraxes to create a latticework of explanation. We then attempt to reconstruct early childhood events and experiences that may defy objective verification. This methodology has been attacked on many counts. Given that analysts of differing theoretical persuasions will interpret the same clinical data according to various explanatory formulations, how does one determine if one particular formulation is either historically or clinically accurate? Did Freud's hysterics report fantasies of seductions by their fathers or actual seductions? Does the character pathology found in narcissistic disturbances reflect an arrest in the vicissitudes of normal development, or does it constitute a highly pathological distortion of self and object representations that in no way resembles normal developmental processes? Does analysis provide a window into the preverbal experiences of the patient, or is the methodology of analysis confined to those areas of human development that postdate the acquisition of language?

Fortunately, clinical psychoanalysis rests on the bedrock of transference. By carefully examining the developing relationship between the analysand and the analyst, the analyst can gain a glimpse of the players that perform on the patient's intrapsychic stage as they reenact the drama before his very eyes. To a large extent, transference phenomena allows the analyst to minimize the guesswork involved in understanding the patient's early relationships with significant figures. As we are all well aware, however, even the perception, understanding, and interpretation of the analytic transference is infiltrated by theoretical bias and countertransference problems in the analyst.

If clinical psychoanalysis rests on such shaky epistemological foundations, what then