A new language for psychoanalytic diagnosis

Many psychoanalysts believe it is impossible to conduct empirical research without eviscerating or trivializing psychoanalytic constructs, and past research efforts have all too often reinforced this view. A new method for studying personality and personality pathology is presented that challenges such beliefs. This method, the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP), captures the richness and complexity of psychoanalytic constructs and formulations while also providing reliable data for research. The method is being used to develop a new personality disorder taxonomy, as an alternative to the DSM, that is both empirically grounded and psychoanalytically relevant. Its role in psychoanalytic training and supervision is discussed, as is its value as a measure of structural change in psychoanalytic process and outcome research.     

The psychoanalytic process

Analysts differ in how they conceptualize the psychoanalytic process, according to their understanding of the psychoanalytic theory of mental functioning in general and the nature of pathogenesis in particular. Emphasizing that psychoanalysis is a psychology of mental conflict, the authors see the psychoanalytic process in terms of the dynamic interplay between the manifestations of the patient's unconscious and the analyst's interventions. What analysts communicate to analysands serves to destabilize the equilibrium of forces within the mind, leading to the analysands' growing understanding of the nature of their conflicts and how they deal with them. Psychoanalytic process, accordingly, cannot be distinguished or separated from psychoanalytic technique.     

The limits of psychoanalytic insight

Psychoanalysis has the intellectual power to decipher the inner structure of subjectivity, thus distinguishing itself from neighbouring human sciences. In doing so psychoanalysis is able to show the damages a society does to its individuals. Present-day psychoanalytic practice and thinking however runs counter to these inherent possibilities. The interaction of unresolvable neurotic phenomena and ideological bias in individual psychoanalysts reflect the increasing subsumption of psychoanalysis under the dominating interests of society--a dependency, which characterizes the actual psychoanalytic practice and theories in our time as basically affirmative.     

The technique of psychoanalytic therapy

This article is reproduced in translation a half century after its original presentation by Dr. Horney. It was her first psychoanalytic publication and her first article on psychoanalytic technique. In it we get glimpses of future directions of her thinking and of the spirit of research and investigation which so characterized her life's work — Editor.