THE USEFULNESS OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS

Despite early research endeavors on the results of psychotherapies that were conducted in the 1910s and 1920s by some of the pioneers of psychoanalysis, the knowledge of the results of these empirical studies on efficacy is still today rather minimal among psychoanalysts themselves, who have tended to privilege knowledge based on clinical reports over that produced with empirical research tools. A review of more recent studies is presented, both those that investigate the efficacy of analytic treatments, by now widely demonstrated, and those that propose to understand how and for whom analytic treatment works, and to clarify which are the truly operative therapeutic factors. Finally, there is a discussion of the difficult relationship between psychoanalysis and empirical research, and of the necessity of integrating empirical studies into the clinical and conceptual property of psychoanalysis.