Construct validity and transpositional research: Toward an empirical study of psychoanalytic concepts

L IKE ALL GREAT HOUSES, the magnificent edifice of psychological constructs, erected by the master-architect Sigmund Freud has a resident ghost. This ghost is the spirit of verification. The imposing structure of psychoanalytic concepts has, of course, considerable in-ternal consistency and coherence. This, otherwise felicitous circumstance however, further complicates the situation by frequently leading to substitution of fraternal concurrence for construct validity. The following quotation from Heinz Hartmann will illustrate my point. In this (analytic) setting, data do appear which are not, or not easily, accessible to other methods. This asset as to factfinding has of course, a disadvantage in another respect: an observation an analyst makes may seem entirely credible to another analyst who possesses the necessary experience, an interpretation quite convincing, while the same observation may appear hardly credible, the same interpretation highly improbable o;aartificial, to one who approaches the field with a different method and in a different setting. It is the responsibility of those who seek to understand and to explain to others human behavior in its infinite complexity yet essential lawfulness, to make the fruit