Psychoanalytic Research

Abstract

Put it in a simple way, the central problem of living together between psychoanalysis and controlled investigation resides in the tendency of that kind of investigator, to believe too much in the rituals of facts recollection, and hypothesis demonstration, leaving aside the foreseeable significance of his study. A triviality observed in one hundred cases and proved by sophisticated statistical process, keeps being trivial. On the other hand, the psychoanalysts tend to make very restrictive observations, and immediately to project theories already constructed about the material, imagining they are proving them. In my opinion, the minimal investigation I have just exposed, has only one merit to point out in the context of this discussion. It shows that it is possible to arise from common observations —technical and not technical— to make that our metha-psychology, which confronts its frontiers with philosophy and literature, keeps on working, producing new subjects, new way of guiding the answers. The problem of the relative and provisional autonomy of the psychical object, of its flows and over-flows in relation to the I, demands much more empirical metha-psychological investigation yet, may be such as this one, but above all, clinical studies. Psychoanalysis will exist as long as it can be inside itself reinvented.