Converging Evidence for Emotional Structures: Theory and Method

Abstract

The task of the psychoanalytic researcher is in part to verify what the clinician already knows. For much of what the researcher finds the response of the clinician must be, “I knew that all along.” But the goal of research must also be to discover what we have previously had no access to, and what we seem to know, but wrongly. You can see that the work of the researcher is in some respects like that of the patient as well as the therapist. All participants in the psychoanalytic enterprise are attempting to detect psychic structures that have previously been unrecognized. At all levels, the achievement of new knowledge, the “surprise”, depends on the articulation of connections and associations so that gaps can be uncovered and ambiguities resolved.