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The Psychotherapy Research Project of The Menninger Foundation was started in the early 1950s, with the goal of learning more about what changes occur in psychoanalytic therapies (outcome) and how those changes come about (process). The principal findings were that psychoanalyses and psychoanalytic psychotherapies alike consistently were modified in a supportive direction, that more of the achieved changes
Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychiatry, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco; Training and Supervising Analyst, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
This paper was presented in a somewhat abbreviated form at the New York Psychoanalytic Society, 12 April 1994. The material has been abstracted from a variety of publications describing the Psychotherapy Research Project (PRP) of The Menninger Foundation as well as PRP-II, its successor project at Langley Porter Institute, particularly “Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Relative Roles Reconsidered” (Wallerstein, 1988a) and “Assessment of Structural Change in Psychoanalytic Therapy and Research” (Wallerstein, 1988b). The most active members of PRP were, in alphabetical order: Ann Appelbaum, Stephen Appelbaum, Esther Burstein, Lolafaye Coyne, Gerald Ehrenreich, Michalina Fabian, Mildred Faris, Bernard Hall, Leonard Horwitz, Otto Kernberg, Lester Luborsky, Martin Mayman, Herbert Modlin, Gardner Murphy, Marjorie Orth, Lewis Robbins, Irwin Rosen, Helen Sargent, Richard Siegal, William Tarnower, Ernst Ticho, Gertrude Ticho, Harold Voth, and Robert Wallerstein. The active members of PRP-II have been Kathryn De Witt, Dianna Hartley, Saul Rosenberg, Robert Wallerstein, Daniel Weiss, and Nathan Zilberg.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 49, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright © 1994 by Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
were based on the operation of supportive mechanisms than was anticipated, and that, in many instances, the kinds of change achieved on the basis of these supportive mechanisms were indistinguishable from those that came about through the interpretive resolution of intrapsychic conflict. The final clinical accounting of PRP, Forty-Two Lives in Treatment, was published in 1986 and included follow-ups for up to thirty years. A successor project, PRP-II, was started at the Langley Porter Institute in the mid-1980s and is ongoing. It is an effort to pursue the findings and conclusions of PRP by defining in more precise operational terms the concepts of psychic structure and structural change and then linking attained structural changes to the mechanisms, supportive or interpretive-expressive, by which they have come about. Scales of Psychological Capacities is a research instrument devised to reflect underlying structure and structural change.