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The attempt has been made in this paper to describe some changes in the current scientific atmosphere of the United States and to trace their possible impact upon psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic research. There appears to be a revitalization of a Lockean tradition of empiricism within study sections of the national Government, which has so much direct influence on university-housed research. To the extent that a great deal of psychoanalytic research has become so institutionalized, some thought must be given to the future of these programs.
I have tried to indicate that the nature of the phenomenological field with which psychoanalysis deals makes it impossible to compress psychoanalysis into the mold of a nineteenth-century concept of physics and the physical experiment. Pressures to alter analytic research are considerable, and make it obligatory for analysis to maintain a critical self-inventory of its methods. In this direction I have tried to describe those aspects of modes of scientific work which present themselves in the psychoanalytic literature as the psychoanalytic research methods of analysts.