Applied Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytically Informed Research

The principal method of psychoanalytic inquiries into conscious and unconscious aspects of human experience and mental functioning is to listen psychoanalytically to the patient or, in applied research, other research subjects. Based on Freud’s and later theorists’ hypotheses on the transference of patterns of personal relatedness to others – including unconscious wishes, anxiety and psychological defense – a focus on the relationship between psychoanalyst and analysand or between individual members of groups and their leaders is a near-mandatory feature of psychoanalytic research. That this methodology is qualitative and inevitably lacks quantification has, historically, impelled some non-psychoanalytic researchers to reject it as unscientific.

The editors of this issue in Frontiers in Psychology all combine their vocation as practicing psychoanalysts with being academic researchers in psychiatry, neuroscience, or psychology. Our experience of psychoanalytically grounded research in different fields (studies of political and ethnic conflicts and their resolution, suicide research, psychotherapy research, epistemological studies, and more) is that it is sometimes appropriate to extend one’s methodological arsenal beyond the limits of the clinical encounter. This holds true even as we acknowledge the power of psychoanalytic, including transference-based, explorations of subjective experience.

We invite authors to make use of this issue as a platform for publishing different types of studies whose findings are relevant to psychoanalytic elaboration, and for disseminating psychoanalytically derived knowledge in the understanding of man. Contributions may range from empirical studies on clinical questions and neuroscientific topics to studies of the adaptation of individuals or groups in potentially traumatizing historical, psychosocial, medical, or other crises. Psychoanalytically well-informed contributions by writers in the history of literature or the arts are welcomed, as are similarly knowledgeable philosophical or historical discussions of psychoanalysis itself.