Conducting and Describing a Long-Term Psychotherapy Study: Questions and Issues

There are always questions, at least implicit, concerning the scientific justification for publication, especially of books; such questions are heightened when the presentation of findings and conclusions is from data gathered in the course of

a research study that was initiated some 30 years ago. In one sense, one can state, of course, that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are in themselves long-term undertakings (in this project, some treatments studied ran over 10 years), and one can add that appropriate follow-up adds further years to the official span of study. One can then add the truism that a research study—the gathering of data, especially of such great volume, of such complexity, and over so long a span of time; analyzing the data in a variety of ways (clinical analysis, formal Prediction Study, quantitative study derived from the data of the paired comparisons); and writing all this up—also characteristically takes longer than originally projected. And all this then gives a certain comforting warrant to the long time span between the conception and inception of a psychotherapy project and the point at which final outcomes and results can be presented.

In these senses, psychotherapy research, if it concerns these kinds of long-term psychoanalytically based treatments, partakes fully of the usual problems of long-term growth and developmental studies—carrying out all that work, over all that time, while holding the research group generally intact enough to complete it.1 It raises, too, an additional problem for the final write-up at the end: the fact that the field itself (whether it is psychotherapy or development) has itself moved significantly over that time span, both in terms of empirical work done and in terms of conceptual-theoretical advance. True, as compared with the natural sciences, the pace of movement and of change in psychotherapy is far slower, and the difficulty created by writing up today work t