Empirical Research Shows Benefits of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Shore (2003) suggests that interdisciplinary research in the fields of biology, neurochemistry, and developmental psychology can complement each other and shed more light on human socioemotional development and therefore inform psychoanalytic thought and its anchoring in science, developmental psychology, and biology of attachment and affect.

For example, cross-disciplinary research on mutual gaze interactions between mother and infant, neurobiology of attachment bond formation, and the biological development of an infant's orbitofrontal cortex have significant implications for clinical models of psychoanalysis, which generally focus on “human emotional development and functioning” (Shore, 2003).

A metaphor for the connectedness of various disciplinary research efforts can be thought of as that of a tree and its branches. A theory can be viewed as the trunk of a tree, and research efforts as the added branches, twigs, leaves, and buds:

Tree Metaphor
Empirical support → Leaves
Hypotheses → Branches
Theory → Trunk
Related interdisciplinary theories → Roots (body of knowledge in psychoanalysis)

Using the tree metaphor we can see how interdisciplinary research contributes to the health of the underlying theory in question. Kuhn (1962) supports this incremental view that related empirical studies are important, saying that the “backbone of normal science lies in the slow accumulation of narrow studies.”

Shore's view of relatedness among disciplines includes, for example, Kohut's (1968) writing on the importance of mother-infant mirroring interactions and how it is supported by Fridlund's (1991) neurobiological research conclusions that psychoanalytic transference processes are evident in the patient's quick “appraisal of the therapist's face in movements…around the eyes and from prosodic expressions from the mouth.”

Here we can see the complementary and supportive intersection of neurobiology and psychoanalytic research.

Social science research (and psychoanalytic research in particular) often relies on information gathered from human subjects as its basis. The interaction of subject and experimental setting can lead to findings that result from factors other than those considered by the researcher.

Within the field of critical thinking in psychotherapy and scientific reasoning, these issues are especially important, since interpretation must always be separated from observation.

In most behavioral studies the subjects are aware of their role in the research and often respond differently than if they were unaware of the experiment.

The experimental factors responsible for this change in behavior have been termed the “demand characteristics of the experimental setting” and are defined as the mixture of various hints and cues that govern the subject's perceptions of his or her role in the research and of the researcher's hypothesis (Orne, 1962, in Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1991).

Subjects who are aware of the researcher's hypothesis may attempt to behave altruistically and give results they believe the researcher desires.

These demand characteristics are evident in the mother-infant studies described by Shore (2003) in that the mother and infant may be aware of being observed, and the mothers may attempt to present themselves as competent and psychologically healthy to the researcher (Cook & Campbell, 1979, p.67).

In psychoanalytic research, although the physical setting is relatively more simple than in complex organizational and workplace studies, demand characteristics can pose threats to validity and can result in the confounding of causal interpretations.

As we touched on in class, the Hawthorne Studies showed that an experiment's physical setting can inadvertently interact with the behavioral variables being studied and can lead to erroneous results.

These methodological considerations are also relevant when thinking about how clinicians interpret dream material in psychoanalytic treatment or unconscious communications in therapy.

The intended treatment in the Hawthorne Studies – greater illumination of working conditions – was mistaken for the inadvertent treatment of greater managerial concern for employees' working conditions.

Experimental demand characteristics do not always result in “positive” responses from research subjects.

For example, psychoanalytic treatments as part of a research study may introduce experimental demand characteristics that induce “negative” responses from patients resulting from resentment of researchers as authority (coercive) figures.

Argyris (1968) concluded that behavioral researchers, in their pursuit of experimental rigor, could induce unintended negative consequences in the experimental setting.

It is therefore important for researchers to factor these considerations into their interpretations of findings and causal inferences, such as a conclusion that the treatment itself resulted in changes in the patient's symptoms when in fact the demand characteristics of the experimental setting may have had a confounding effect.