Chapter 11: How Empirical Research Can Help Clinicians Evaluate Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice: A Pragmatic Approach

One of the defining features of psychodynamic psychotherapies, regardless of theoretical orientation, is their focus on working with unconscious processes. But this common purpose is not matched by an equally coherent ontological understanding of the unconscious (what its essential properties are and how it is formed), nor by a shared epistemological approach (how we best investigate its characteristics and determine what we can know about it). The differing opinions on such issues can be held with great passion and conviction, and this has often led to acrimonious disagreements and splits within the psychotherapy profession, from the initial vitriolic rupture between Freud and Jung (McGuire, 1961), through the controversial discussions (King & Steiner, 1990), to the contemporary disagreements between relational and classical psychoanalysis (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 2009; Wachtel, 2010).