were dedicated to the question as to how such, typically psychoanalytical observations of changes in the psychoanalytical process can best be documented and communicated – no less to render them comprehensible and susceptible to criticism from the outside (for further details see sections 2.1) The present paper also discusses how the conceptualization of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline necessitates critical reflection in a fruitful dialogue with other contemporary scientific disciplines (see also Leuzinger-Bohleber, in press). The paper goes on to argue that it is crucial for psychoanalysis to maintain its specificity as well as the richness of contemporary psychoanalytical research (see 2.). I focus on the situation in Germany, for the most part in reference to a single concrete research example: the major, ongoing LAC Depression Study at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt (see ODR). ;&01(R2!$#!.4&!I-#'(&'SM&1(!I*2.$(3!$,!;&2&1(/4!*#!723/4$1#1532*2! Freud’s life-long hope was that following the development of modern natural sciences there would come a time in which the insights of psychoanalysis – as acquired by practitioners through the application of purely psychological, clinical methods of observation in the psychoanalytical situation – would also be “objectively” examined by way of the “hard” methods of natural science. This is a scenario which has today, in many respects become reality in the dialogue with the modern neurosciences. However, forty years ago Jürgen Habermas (1968) introduced an epistemic critique of Freud’s aspiration to “objectively” study psychoanalysis by natural scientific methodology. He described the longing for “objectivity” as the “scientistic self-misconstrual” (Szientistisches Selbstmissverständnis) of psychoanalysis. He characterized psychoanalysis as following an emancipatory interest in insight, in contrast to behavioural therapy, which is motivated by a technical interest. This distinction met with a positive response by an entire generation in the Western countries, whereas, due to other factors, psychoanalysis reached a height to which it never returned. As a hermeneutic method of individual and social unconscious sources of psychic and psychosomatic suffering, on the whole, psychoanalysis experienced the kind of social acceptance in these years which at times verged on idealization. Although there were always attacks and controversies, as a method of treatment and as a critical theory of culture, psychoanalysis had no need for concern with respect to its legitimacy during this period. The social acceptance during these decades also impacted upon the understanding of science and research in psychoanalysis (see e.g. Zaretzky, 2004/2006; Makari, 2008, Leuzinger-Bohleber, 2011). In short, during 1970’s and 1980’s, aside from genuine clinical psychoanalytic research, this, above all, involved hermeneutically oriented and social psychological approaches, the analysis of culture and an interdisciplinary exchange with philosophy, sociology and literary studies, humanities and pedagogy, as well as film and art. Empirical, and especially quantitative research in psychoanalysis and the dialogue with the natural sciences, were considered by many as naïve and unsuited to psychoanalysis, even to the point of being harmful. As Thomas Kuhn describes in his analysis of the history of science, different paradigms often exist side by side within a scientific discipline. However, one of them usually predominates, namely, that which is best-suited to the Zeitgeist. The above-mentioned understanding of psychoanalysis as a critical hermeneutics of the 1970’s and 1980’s is still vividly represented in many countries and several IPA societies (see e.g. Green, 2003; De Mijolla, 2003; Perron, 2003, 2006; Widlöcher, 2003; Ahumada & Doria-Medina, 2009; Bernardi, 2003 and in this volume; Vinocur de Fischbein, 2009; Duarte Guimaraes Filho, 2009; Scarfone, in this volume). In some countries, particularly in the United States, England, Germany and some of the Nordic countries, the adjustment to an empirical research paradigm has been pushed to the fore over the last decades (see, among others, Fonagy, 2009, and in this volume). In these countries the Zeitgeist has changed since the 1970s: in times of “evidence-based medicine” and of medical guidelines, one sometimes has the impression that for psychoanalysis, too,
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