Joseph Masling was elected to honorary membership in the American for his forty-plus years of work in empirical studies of psychoanalytic theories. Here are excerpts from his acceptance speech.
I began my investigations of psychoanalytic ideas as an attempt to bury them, not praise them. For a variety of reasons, psychoanalysis has never enjoyed a savory reputation in most departments of psychology located outside New York City, a situation even worse now than when I was a student in the 1950s. I chose to investigate oral imagery in the obese, expecting to find no support for the underlying psychodynamic hypothesis. Instead, the results — to my great surprise — were consistent with the hypothesis. Undaunted, I went on to a second effort to discredit psychoanalytic notions by examining oral imagery in alcoholics. These results, too, were consistent with the hypothesis. In fact, the first four studies of psychoanalytic ideas I conducted produced statistically significant results.
Four for four, whether in baseball or social science, are rare occurrences which no prudent investigator should ignore. I was hooked, not by the theory, and surely not by the prolix and convoluted writing analysts are so fond of using, but by data. I learned that psychoanalytic ideas had a great deal of merit, although the received truth in academic psychology departments said otherwise.
For several frankly political reasons, in 1983 I instituted the Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories series, never dreaming there would be sufficient material for ten volumes. I wished to demonstrate to the general population of psychologists the absurdity in the old canard that psychoanalytic thinking is inimical to experimental study. I estimate that there must be well over 5,000 empirical studies based on psychodynamic ideas; in fact, psychoanalytic theories have proven to be so robustly heuristic they have probably inspired more research in personality than [has] any other set of ideas. I also wished to show the psychoanalytic public that research can be relevant to clinical issues and that analytic ideas can be studied in context without damaging their intrinsic quality.
A third goal — to induce the analytic establishment to recognize that research results can provide major support in its public relations efforts — has been more difficult to reach. In an era where managed health care and empirically demonstrated therapies have helped formulate public policy, remaining aloof from the documented scientific merit of analysis amounts to professional suicide. The old tradition of treating empirical methods as irrelevant to psychoanalysis exacts a heavy cost. With notable exceptions, psychoanalysis continues to rely-exclusively on clinical data, even though we know that the memory and notes of each party in the therapeutic interaction show systematic errors, omissions, distortions, and inventions. Few analytic institutes offer any training in research methods. Little wonder, then, that mitotic splits within psychoanalysis occur frequently, based not on data but on nothing more substantial than the claims of a charismatic leader and dissatisfaction with the status quo. There must be at least a dozen different psychoanalytic schools, each somehow able to point to clinical evidence as justification for its position. From the outside, this looks more like anarchy than useful discussion.
I do not demean clinical evidence as the source of wonderfully rich insights. Unfortunately, the same method that has uncovered so many psychoanalytic treasures has also led to the discovery of fool's gold. Clinicians have been known to embrace each with equal fervor. Only careful empirical testing can distinguish between those ideas that are useful and those that have little merit. As could be expected of a theory now 100 years old, a number of psychoanalytic ideas have little scientific support and should be dropped from the canon. Happily, many other psychoanalytic constructs are consistent with scientific evidence. A proper scientific discipline should constantly trim its books, removing ideas no longer useful, modifying others to fit experimental data. Perhaps some day an official text of psychoanalysis will be written, consistent with empirical results.
A great deal of work in advancing research in psychoanalysis has already been completed. Much more remains to be done, particularly in gaining the recognition that research is vital to the best interests, status, and health of psychoanalysis. The honor conferred on my work this morning is evidence that such recognition is already under way.