Psychoanalytic Process Research Strategies

Hartvig Dahl This is a book about the future that we hope will arouse the curiosity of clinicians and point a direction for researchers. It marks the surprisingly rapid evolution of psychodynamic psychotherapy research from an applied toward a basic science, and, as its title implies, describes strategies to follow rather than results to live by. It was not always thus. A quarter of a century ago the editors of two volumes of psychotherapy research reports summarized the state of the field then: Although there has been a great accumulation of clinical observations and experimental findings, the field has made relatively little progress. There has been little creative building on the work of others (Parloff and Rubinstein 1962) . Psychological research generally has tended to be insuffi­ ciently additive. Research people often find it hard to keep informed of related work done on the same site and else­ where, and therefore do not build upon each other's foun­ dation (Luborsky and Strupp 1962) .