The Psychoanalytic Process: Treatment and Results

Abstract

Some of the psychoanalytic treatments presented in this chapter go back to the form of systematic case study we mentioned in Sect. 1.3. Nostalgia is not the reason that we refer back to therapies that are long past; the reason is that the long follow-up periods are an excellent basis for discussing the outcome of therapy. The research into the process and outcome of psychoanalysis that we have initiated in Ulm has developed out of our experience with systematic case studies (Thoma 1978) and the investigation of interpretative actions (see Sect. 8.3); the results of this research have motivated us to adopt a new understanding of the psychoanalytic process (see Vo1.1, Chap. 9). More is expected of this research than we can present in this textbook, which for didactic reasons must have a broad clinical basis and include a large number of different cases. The combined research into the process and outcome of psychoanalysis with respect to individual cases, which we and others have propagated, is still in its infancy (Grawe 1988). If we were to describe such cases in the necessary detail, then this textbook would consist of only one of them.