Research in Psychoanalysis:  

Eighty or ninety years ago, we were a highly respected lot of professionals: we were discovering new and fascinating things about the human subject. We created a unique vocabulary and but used it carelessly. Fifty years later we were expected to account for our discoveries by people who were not part of our closed community. Karl Popper questioned our way of thinking because we started to use our vocabulary as if it is the discovery itself. Eysenck demanded proofs to what we presumed to be facts. Instead of looking into those criticisms we tightened the noose around ourselves and ignored criticism. Gradually but surely, we felt inferior to other professionals. Then came the thought that research is the means to proving our worth. It was a regrettable thought because all what we had in mind is to imitate research done in psychology and psychiatry, not realising that psychoanalysis is not a psychology or a psychiatry.    

Research is meant to exact answers to floating questions that could sometimes take the form of a hypotheses. To start, we have to eliminate the two notions that there are quantitative researches and qualitative researches and that quantitative research is better. You say: “Practically, all research is initially qualitative-by definition-otherwise from where do hypotheses emanate? In good (my emphasis) research, one usually moves from qualitative to quantitative”. To take a short cut: if all research start qualitatively and end quantitatively thus this criterion is indiscriminative. The criterion that is discriminative, and pertains to psychoanalysis too, is the nomothetic sciences and the idiographic sciences. Because the physical world’s exitance is independent of the researcher (except in quantum physics) we can research it- via experimental work- and come to exact answers to its questions, because the experiments are replicable and stand the variation of the research circumstance. In human sciences, it is impossible to reach answers through experimentation, because the subject in any experiment is a constituent of the circumstances of the experiment. Just to underline this point: all nomothetic researches start with a hypothesis (a question that needs an answer of the type of yes or no, correct or wrong, equivocal or definite). The reason is that we can experiment with the physical world, i.e., to eliminate in a systematic way the possible contaminations of the phenomenon we are researching. Quantitative measure in that field of research is not an after though but is the basis the scientist is going to base his conclusions on. The quantitative results are decided by the way the hypothesis needs to be addressed.

 In contrast, I will propose hypothetical experiment in human sciences about dreams. I take the last twenty dreams of my patients’ and interpret them, showing that the strings of association about each part of the dream intersect with other strings at particular points and in the same particular way. I use that to prove that they all link a day residue with an infantile wish. This research would mean nothing because I have to show that my colleague Dr. D.  has reached the same conclusion reviewing the same data, which is not a reasonable expectation. Moreover, my colleague Dr. D.  should do the same thing with twenty dreams of his patients and I should corroborate his interpretations. This is what research in psychoanalysis should be if we want to use the experimental model of research.  I not only doubt that that this is what was in Dr. Seitler’s mind when he talks about research in psychoanalysis.

However, since experimental psychologists invented the system of rating scales some research was done using them in social psychology, educational studies, etc. [Rating scales have to be subjected to very scientific scrutiny to be used as research tools. Be ware of what you wish for]. There are differences between research and methodical, systematic exploration or assessment of human phenomena. The maximum we should aspire for in the psychoanalytic field is to come up with phenomena of psychoanalytic relevance to explore and examine them in a methodical and systematic ways. This is not an easy thing to do. We might be tempted chose what we think is psychoanalytically important, create our own rating scales. decide the method of quantifying what observe, make comparisons and com to conclusions. This would not be research because the psychoanalytic issues that could be studied that way comprise unconscious elements that- by definition-are undefinable to be observed. If we want to examine -in a methodical way- the changes in the positive and negative features the transference in treatment of two different disease entities or the beginning and the end of an analysis, we would be observing the Cs., and Pcs. manifestations of transference.

Thus, research or methodical exploration in psychoanalysis be with issues and not ideas and concepts. An example, if we notice (I did) that patients who do not have a sense humour are less acceptable of partial interpretations, which sometimes are necessary. A research in the evolution of humour in human subjects (by an intuition Freud studied jokes very early in his career to show how humour is based on partial recognition of metaphors and metonymy) could be useful in showing how an infant smiles to his mother’s baby talk, a little later giggles to a peek-a- boo game, then to “knock-knock” in adolescences, then humor in adulthood, and the ability to understand and use metaphors in social communication and understand later in life. It would also help the analysts to gradually shoe the patient that his symptom is a metaphor of childhood experiences. Those kinds of research are only possible in university setting because they require more than a clinical psychoanalyst.