The Legacy of Enrico Jones: Psychoanalysis and Research

As a psychoanalyst and psychology professor, Enrico Jones contributed to psychoanalysis and academic psychology with research that combined the insider's understanding of clinical psychoanalysis with the rigor of academic methodology. Jones, who died March 29, 2003, was professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, member and faculty at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and member of the Standing Committee on Research of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

In the words of J. Stuart Ablon, director, Psychotherapy Research Program, Massachusetts General Hospital, and a collaborator with Jones, “Dr. Jones recognized the need for quantitative methods that both preserve the depth and complexity of clinical material while conforming to the requirements of empirical science.”

Clinical process research that tests psychoanalytic developmental and theoretical ideas serves our profession. Scientific research that can bear the scrutiny of competitive academic research and a skeptical public is important for the future health of psychoanalysis.

Enrico Jones's psychoanalytic process research work pursued these ends. Like other researchers who have looked at the analyst and the analytic process as a research problem to be methodologically investigated (Fonagy and Target, Sandler, Strupp, Luborsky, Sampson and Weiss, Wallerstein), Jones developed research methods and research studies on psychoanalytic outcome and process.

In his early academic career, Jones published research on psychological aspects of race. He studied personality differences between samples of black and white junior college students. As he became engaged with the complexity of studying race and personality, he saw the necessity of developing and using qualitative research methods.

Jones was born in Germany, the son of an African-American career military officer and a German mother. No doubt he knew from his own experience how inadequate and inaccurate stereotypes—even those based on the most sophisticated qualitative measures—are in describing an individual.

Process and Outcome

From his early research on race and personality, he went on to study therapist gender and treatment process and outcome and then to his later work on psychotherapy process and outcome. From the 1980s until his death in 2003, Jones was deeply involved in the development of methodologies, most specifically the Process Q-set (PQS), to research the processes and mechanisms of change in psychotherapy.

Peter Fonagy describes Jones's PQS as a research instrument capable of capturing the subtlety and complexity of real clinical experience and process. Fonagy explains that the PQS “forces hapless coders to try to effectively rank 100 items in terms of how well they describe a therapeutic session.” The items concern (a) patients' attitudes, behavior, or experience; (b) the therapist's actions and attitudes; and (c) the nature of the interaction of the dyad.

Ablon adds, “The Psychotherapy Process Q-set, is a pantheoretical instrument that captures the uniqueness of each treatment hour while permitting the assessment of the similarities or dissimilarities between hours.”

With a multidisciplinary team, the Berkeley Psychotherapy Research Project group, Jones conducted and published empirical studies with the Q-set methodology. As Fonagy pointed out, Jones addressed such issues as refining the role of gender in the outcome of psychotherapy, positive outcomes associated with treatment and emergent patient shifts from external reality-oriented constructions to inner or self-reflective constructions.

Jones's strength as a researcher and clinical thinker was evidenced by his development of an operationalized model of therapeutic process derived from statistical analyses. In Fonagy's words, he operationalized Sandler's concept of “role-responsiveness and empirically demonstrated how patients nudge their therapists and analysts into enactments of transference dynamics.”

These studies culminated in Jones's book, Therapeutic Action, published in 2000. In his preface, Jones wrote, “The efforts of the Berkeley Project led to the development of a theory of insight and the effects of the therapistpatient relationship. It brings together these polarities in a new framework.” Fonagy describes Therapeutic Action as “the only quasimanual of psychotherapy which is evidencebased… In no other manual is the proximity of theory and practice so carefully nurtured and kept constantly center-stage.”

Continuing the Mission

We are saddened by the death of Enrico Jones but encouraged by evidence of his lasting legacy. A symposium of the Research Associates of the American Psychoanalytic Association at the January 2004 meeting paid tribute to Jones. Organizer Wilma Bucci summarized the success of that symposium, “I think that the presentation of Rico's work was effective in helping to carry forward his mission: demonstrating the connection between process and outcome in psychoanalysis; and demonstrating to psychoanalysts that research is relevant for their clinical work and for the public health evaluation of the field.”

Ablon concluded, “Enrico Jones left the psychoanalytic community with a progressive model, a proven instrument, and the empirical methods necessary to test and refine this model in the future with the hope of better understanding how and why psychoanalysis is helpful.”