CLINICAL AND OBSERVATIONAL PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH: ROOTS

Claude Levi-Strauss said the scientist is not necessarily the person who gives the right answers, but the person who asks the right questions. This volume illustrates that some psychoanalysts are still a long way from asking helpful questions about the role of research. The volume contains the edited proceedings of a conference cum debate, primarily between Daniel Stern and André Green, on the value of empirical research to psychoanalysis. The conference organizers and editors of this volume clearly intended to illuminate. Instead, the book reinforces the same unhelpful assumptions that have squelched psychoanalytic research for generations. André Green casts himself in the role of arch antiempiricist and staunch defender of the psychoanalytic faith, or his version of it. He sees empirical research as not only irrelevant to psychoanalysis but as a subversive threat to its spirit. He impugns the credentials of psycho-analytic researchers and implies they are unqualified to be psycho