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For those aware of psychoanalytic history: some years ago, many analysts were awaiting the second volume of Ralph Greensons's The Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis. It has never appeared. The obvious reason was Greenson's death. The less obvious reason is that the evolution of psychoanalytic theory has been mired in the separation of theory and praxis. Understandings of what psychoanalysis is needed to progress from a singular view of Sigmund Freud's opus to the view that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, pluralism and diversity had become the sine qua non for any definition of psychoanalysis.
Since publication of Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis , we have been awaiting a volume that would give an equivalent value to praxis as Fenichel's encyclopedic project afforded theory. The idea of a paradigm shift in psychoanalysis has been suggested often but has always failed. Leo Rangell considered this failure to be an effect of a pars pro toto mode of thinking. Along with the publication of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , we now have what has been missing: the research effort of Tuckett et al. spanning the period of 20 years, published as Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know.
Spearheaded by the European Psychoanalytic Federation's Clinical Methods Working Party, the initial results were published in 2008. The project involved over one thousand psychoanalysts taking part in the workshops in a manner that allowed the analysts to present their view of their own work, or “what they considered ordinary everyday sessions of psychoanalysis” (p. 1; emphasis in original). Instead of focusing on the usual critique (made from the listener's perspective), the listeners/analysts focused on “what the presenter seemed to be doing and why they seemed to be doing it, from their point of view” (p. 1). The work of these groups was supplemented by data summaries and by creation of