On February 7, 1992, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel of psychoanalysts presented a symposium entitled The Science of Psychoanalysis. The distinguished participants were invited by Stephen Sonnenberg, M.D., chair of The American's Committee on Public Information; the symposium was intended to give a more positive view of psychoanalysis than was presented at last year's AAAS Washington Meeting by Frank J. Sulloway, Morris Eagle, and Adolf Grunbaum. That panel had generated a number of sensationalist articles critical of psychoanalysis in the popular press. In addition to Sonnenberg, of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, those participating this year in Chicago were Bertram J. Cohler, Ph.D., and Robert Galatzer-Levy, M.D., of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the University of Chicago; Henry M. Bachrach, Ph.D., of New York Medical College; James T. McLaughlin, M.D., of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute; and Aaron H. Esman, M.D., of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Cornell University Medical College.
Bachrach's paper, “On the Outcome and Efficacy of Psychoanalysis,” emphasized that psychoanalysis was an empirical science, that there existed serious outcome studies of 600 cases, that patients selected as suitable for analysis regularly derive substantial benefit from it, and that the results of psychoanalysis are comparable to those of other medical treatments. He explained that the psychoanalytic process was extremely complex and therefore hard to study; that studying it was different from research on the efficacy of, for example, a drug; and that analytic researchers were working to develop improved methods for such study in the future.
In “Psychoanalysis: An Evolving Discipline,” Esman described the evolution of Freud's ideas, the different theoretical perspectives that inform clinical analysts, research in human development and its impact on the clinical perspective, and the emerging integration of psychoanalysis and neurobiology. He spoke also of research into psychoanalytic process.
Addressing themselves to the question “What Kind of a Science is Psychoanalysis?” Cohler and Galatzer-Levy described the view of positive science that dominated Freud's years of discovery, the social context that supported that perspective, and the contribution to contemporary analysis of Freud's emphasis on the study of meaning. They explained that psychoanalysis is a modern human science, focusing on the experience-near study of the way individuals make sense of a presently told life story, enacted anew within the psychoanalytic situation.
McLaughlin, in “Freud's Dual Perspective on the Analytic Relationship,” noted the tension in Freud's thought, in which a rigorous seeking by the analyst to understand the concerns of the patient, precisely as the patient experiences and articulates them, is contrasted with a view of the analyst's task as that of translating the patient's knowing into deeper truths based on psychoanalytic theory and the analyst's accrued wisdom, thereby allowing the patient to correct the error of his or her ways. McLaughlin observed that analysts today are moving away from the theory-guided perspective, and that this is a shift seen also in empirical examinations of the analytic process.
Sonnenberg, in a paper entitled “Psychoanalysis and War: A Study of Psychoanalysis Applied to Social Science Research,” described a decade of work in the Psychology of Deterrence Project with the political scientist William Kincade. The methodology they developed for exploring the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence, for years the foundation of U.S. interaction with the Soviet Union, involved empathy and introspection in an effort to understand a set of ideas that had come to govern international relations and military strategy. He noted that the findings of the project are borne out by the recent collapse of the Soviet Union.