To the Editor:
I thought that in my “Point of View” article on Psychoanalytic Research in Newsletter 14: March, 1980, written in response to an earlier piece by Dr. Lucy Zabarenko on the same issues, I had indeed adequately expressed my own point of view on this topic. But now the June 1980 Newsletter carries a letter by Phil Rubovitz-Seitz with a query addressed specifically to me, calling attention to a seeming discrepancy between an earlier published statement of mine (1968, in a discussion on psychoanalytic research in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association) with its quoted cautious and purportedly pessimistic perspective and the 1980 statement in the “Point of View” with its quoted presumed more optimistic perspective.
Phil's question directly (and publicly) was “What happened during the past twelve years to make Bob more optimistic about psychoanalytic research?” I think that put this way, the question requires a public answer (though Phil and I as friends and colleagues have also had a private exchange of letters about this). Put as succinctly as I can, I feel today neither more optimistic nor more pessimistic than I did in 1968. At that time I was writing in support of George Engel's sober appraisal of the difficulties, both external, and more importantly, internal, that beset the psychoanalytic research enterprise. I certainly did see it as a fledgling “never really gotten off the ground” (to quote Phil's quote from my article) because of its inherent methodological and conceptual complexity, and also as still “sorely underdeveloped hellip; and beleaguered.” I also saw it, and so stated in many publications at the time, as eminently worth working at, fun to work at, and do-able, albeit slowly and with difficulty. In all of this, incidentally, I was using research into the process and outcome of psychoanalytic therapy as my paradigm instance, but the considerations I adduced I felt were broadly applicable across the whole psychoanalytic research enterprise.
Twelve years later (1980), I do feel that my outlook is quite exactly the same, a sober optimism, tempered by an awareness of the problems and difficulties, and in the Point of View written in response to Lucy Zabarenko, I thought I was taking issue with her overdiscouraged tone about the difficulties put in the path of the research. Both she and I do feel that it is nonetheless important “ and worth doing and on that I feel that my own position has been consistent over time (1968 to 1980) as has, I think, Lucy Zabarenko's.
I hope that this responds adequately to Phil Seitz's query.
Robert S. Wallerstein
San Francisco