The last two issues of the Newsletter (Oct. 1979 and Dec. 1979) have carried an interchange on the state of health of psychoanalytic research that has stimulated me, on the one hand, to a private exchange of correspondence, of both significant agreement and yet also very substantial disagreement, with a central protagonist in the dialogue in the Newsletter, Dr. Lucy Zabarenko, and also now to this public statement of my own in the Newsletter—because I feel that Dr. Zabarenko, much as she propounds a “Point of View” on the state of research in psychoanalysis much of which I fully share, overstates it to a distorting extreme that I am afraid does a disservice to the very objectives of enhancing psychoanalytic research that I know we both espouse.
The dialogue started innocently enough with two “Points of View” articles in the Oct. 1979 Newsletter. One was by Dr. Mardi Horowitz making a statement (or a plea?) for the readiness of our field for a revitalization of its theory and a burgeoning of its research (he called it a resurgence) within the familiar (from natural science) framework of repeated review and sequential clarification of permanently retained data (from process notes), of systematic and formalized approach to the data via multiple and converging points of view, of regularized follow-up inquiry, and of concomitant comparative attention to the data from psychotherapy cases. The other was by Dr. Bertram Cohler making a plea for the other, the so-called hermeneutic approach emphasizing explication of internally consistent life narratives derived from the psychoanalytically unique methods of introspection and empathy.
To be sure, both of these were but programmatic calls and neither essayed (in this brief letter form) to lay out the evidential base for their shared generally optimistic view (though coming from opposed research conceptualizations and research strategies) about the current possibilities for research advance in our field. It is that double statement of programmatic possibility and intent, however, that seems to have aroused Dr. Zabarenko to a finely satirical attack on the kind of “cozy fiction” and “fairy tale which is at best a cliché and at worst a self deception” with which she charges that we collectively as a discipline choose to naively and self-servingly beguile ourselves.
My problem with her spirited and complexity ramifying statement is that I agree with so much of it in part, and to a certain extent, that I can easily myself fall into an opposite overstatement and one-sidedness if I systematically confront the many hurtful or misleading distortions that I also do see in it. But anyway let me try, and in the service of the same goals—the furtherance of psychoanalytic research—that Dr. Zabarenko and I do so fully share.
In her very first statement of “myth,” that “Psychoanalysis is [claims to be] a science,” she asks that we imagine whether any other society of scholars in any other discipline would have to create a Committee on Scientific Activities. But surely she knows, every bit as well as I do, that the need for a specific committee constituted with such a charge stems in significant part from the inordinately complex organizational structure of the American Psychoanalytic Association—unlike that of any other scientific or professional association—in which under one organizational roof are combined a scientific society, a network of educational institutions and their central, standard-setting, monitoring and accrediting body, an examining and certifying structure to credential the individual graduates of those educational institutions, and a professional organization safeguarding the professional interests and values of the members. Given these many-faceted and separate interests organized under one organizational roof, with the concomitant ever-present dynamic that educational and professional activities being so peremptory and so coercive in their requirements can push aside equally vital but less immediately urgent attention to the development of scholarship and to new knowledge advance, the creation of a particular organizational structure or vehicle to highlight and to foster our scholarly and investigative needs as a discipline becomes more understandable.
And this is not to overlook the fact that at the same time, much of the specific impetus to that particular standing committee whose history and functions I know well, since I was its first chairman and I am still continuing as an active member, came from a preceding ad hoc committee of inquiry chaired by Heinz Kohut that did feel that research activity in our field was not as vigorous as it could and should be (for many reasons) and that a standing committee, so constituted and charged, could play a facilitating role in relation to the enhancement, moral and hopefully also material, of serious scholarly and investigative endeavor in psychoanalysis. One of the specific accomplishments of that Committee on Scientific Activities since its inception not so many years ago has been its central (though by no means exclusive) role in the bringing into being of the currently functioning—in a modestly thriving and growing way—of the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research. This Fund, under the auspices of the American Psychoanalytic Association, raises money from the membership through its annual appeal for a supplemental voluntary assessment on top of our organizational dues, and disburses the money to meritorious psychoanalytic grant applications on the basis of a study section peer review mechanism modeled after that at NIMH.
And incidentally, this Fund for Psychoanalytic Research was brought into being just because it has been the well-founded consensus amongst the serious psychoanalytic researchers that there are meritorious psychoanalytic research endeavors and that NIMH has had serious biases against this specific field of research, based on the imputed “softness” (subjectivity) of the field, the fact that the specific nature of its problems and of the research strategies that could most appropriately illuminate them do not lend themselves as well to the familiar experimental and quantifying types of research designs developed first in the natural sciences and on “harder” (more objective) data. In trying to plug this gap in available research support for specifically meritorious psychoanalytic research, the Fund has I think developed an importance in our field out of proportion to the modest size and scope of work that it can actually support.
I have paid such particular attention to just the first statement of “mythology,” and the “evidence” that Dr. Zabarenko adduced in it to score her first point, that the fact that psychoanalysis “yearns” to think of itself as a science is but one of our comforting “myths,” far apart from what she feels is the bitter reality, that this is only a “gesture towards scientific machismo,” a “flirtation” but not a “consummation” etc.; I've paid such attention to this not because it is the most important of her points to which I want to offer a
correcting perspective (since if I had the space here I think I could do the same in sequence with each one of her points, or statements of our “myths,” and some others are much more crucial than this particular one), but because I want to make the central point of my own.
That is, I think that the one-sidedness of her broadsides and the unfair distortions and extremes employed to document and enliven her own main point, her legitimate concerns for the field, for our status as an advancing discipline, has beclouded and warped the proper presentation of the real issue on which I am quite sure that she and I fundamentally agree. This is that psychoanalytic research is hard and suffers under many handicaps. The one kind of handicap is clearly external and has to do indeed with the insufficient support and understanding and interest of many analysts for the research enterprise to which many do give only the lip service that Dr. Zabarenko very properly and heatedly decries. Another, and at least equally vital, kind of handicap under which psychoanalytic research labors is however internal, that it is just plain inordinately complex and difficult, both conceptually and methodologically, and that this is inherent in the nature of the enterprise, its peculiar problems—the unraveling of complex mental states in all their developmental progressions and their ramifying interpenetrations—and the kind of strategies that need be devised in order to tackle such problems.
It is not true, as Dr. Zabarenko properly denies in her statement of Myth #3, that “the methodological problems in psychoanalytic research are over-whelming,” with the concomitant implication that it is “reasonable to wait until technical developments and adequate understanding of analysis in sister sciences develop to the point where they can handle the complexities of our work.” But neither is it true, as Dr. Zabarenko claims in her effort at statement of corrective fact, that “Methodological advances adequate for psychoanalytic research have been available for at least two decades,” with the concomitant unstated implications here that it is primarily the collective unreceptivity of our analytic colleagues that has been such a major roadblock in the way of properly implementing this advanced—and appropriate—methodological know-how into established knowledge advance in our field. As everyone who has worked in this field, Dr. Zabarenko included, knows full well, the work is very difficult but possible (albeit complicated and enormously time consuming); methods are still most imperfect but are being painstakingly created with the need always for methods advance before substance advance; and yet, as Dr. Zabarenko herself says, these “arduous explorations have yielded believable and valuable results.”
If Dr. Zabarenko and I do differ in perspective in any fundamental way it is only that, as I wrote to her in our private correspondence, I have an inherently much more optimistic outlook for our research and scientific future and its support by our discipline than she conveys in the whole spirit of her “Point of View,” including in summation in her last statement as (just) Myth #6 that “There is always hope that these [adverse] trends can be reversed.” In support of my overall stance, as against hers, I will quote from Dr. Zabarenko herself, not from her “Point of View” article in the Dec. 1979 Newsletter, but from her other Newsletter piece, in the immediately preceding Oct. 1979 issue of the Newsletter, the very one which also carried the two “Point of View” articles by Drs. Horowitz and Cohler that spurred Dr. Zabarenko's counterattack in the first place. In the Oct. 1979 Newsletter, Dr. Zabarenko had an article on the George S. Klein Research Forum, held regularly under the auspices of the American Psychoanalytic Association, as an outcome in fact of the research training program of the American and of the desire of the research candidates being trained around the country to have a regular forum “to exchange information on work in progress.”
In the second paragraph of her laudatory explanatory article on the modus operandi of the George S. Klein Memorial Forum, Dr. Zabarenko, who is herself a regular participant in it, describes its style as follows: “The mode of interaction is vivid, familiar and adversarial; focused on conceptual and methodological issues with no quarter asked or given. In short, it constitutes one of the best arenas for critical examination of research in psychoanalysis, one in which experimenters can expose their work and ideas to experienced and knowledgeable colleagues in the certainty that both will receive constructive and unrelenting scrutiny.” In her last paragraph she ends with: “The Forum remains open to any interested researcher or consumer of research… . All that's required is a genuine interest in research and a willingness to play for substantial intellectual stakes.”
For my part, I would only want to state in conclusion that I feel that Dr. Zabarenko's article on the George S. Klein Forum in the Oct. 1979 Newsletter reflects the current state and the exciting potential for psychoanalytic research, at least as much as does her “Point of View” article in the Dec. 1979 Newsletter.
Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D.
San Francisco