Clinical Research in Child Psychoanalysis

Research in psychoanalysis, or the alleged lack of it, has become a burning topic in the field of British psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The widespread insistence by government policy-makers and health service managers on 'evidence-based medicine', as an aspect of public service 'modernisation', has extended to demands that mental health services should be better justified by the evidence of empirical research. This faces psychoanalytic psychotherapists and other exponents of 'talking cures' with the challenge of how to justify their public existence. This chapter discusses the way in which other cultural changes have been working in favour of psychoanalysis and asserts that psychoanalysis shares attributes with both the sciences and the humanities