Institute for Psychanalytic Training and Research

Research at IPTAR

Program of Empirical Research Studies

We take the letter “R” in IPTAR quite seriously and have developed a program that emphasizes hands-on empirical research studies to generate new findings about psychoanalytic treatment. The question of how to understand, let alone establish the validity of our analytic enterprise is a complex one. Starting at the surface, as Freud suggests, we first ask about our patients’ lives. Has treatment affected the quality of their lives, work, patterns of relationships, or self esteem? Next we ask: What has made such change possible? Here we seek to define the facilitating and mediating conditions in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. We are interested in how persistent the changes are. Along these lines, we are pursuing four major research projects, seeking with each to define central psychoanalytic concepts. They are:

The empirical research of the IPTAR Research Group has led to publications in major psychoanalytic journals and presentations at national and international conferences. In addition, the IPTAR Research Faculty has shared in sponsoring dissertation projects at various universities.

Effectiveness of Psychotherapy with Children at the ICC

The relatively few empirical studies of child treatment (either psychotherapy or psychoanalysis) means that our ideas about the efficacy of what we do rests “heavily” on case reports that, however moving or dramatic, tend to resist objective assessment and controlled scrutiny. As the old quip goes, psychoanalytically oriented therapists can fail to realize that data is not the plural of anecdote (Fonagy, P. and Target, M. Mentalization and the Changing Aims of Child Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1998, p.88). The goal of the present study was to provide some objective assessment about how well children do when they are seen in psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. We are not unaware of the limitations of a concept like “objective,” and we would argue that no single measure can give an accurate picture of how a patient has fared in psychotherapy. In the study conducted by the child research team at IPTAR (presented at the Academy of Science), we measured shifts in the parents' perception of their children over time as well as shifts in the children's sense of self, presenting empirical data that lends support to the idea that the conscious and unconscious thoughts and attitudes of parents have a profound impact on influencing the children's perception of themselves. Our data strongly suggest that when parents feel better about themselves in relation to their children, they see the child in a more positive light. And this seems to be reflected in children also feeling better about themselves. The finding that parents’ perceptions of their children are influenced by how they are feeling about themselves as parents is not surprising. Our constructions of the world are always subject to our emotional states. What is surprising is that when parents feel badly about themselves, there is little or no relationship between their subjective states and how they view their children. We see this as a potentially chaotic situation for both parent and child. Children, for example, must learn via social cues that their parents' emotional state has some predictive value as to how they, the children, are seen. When children have a better, i.e., more consistent/coherent sense as to how they will be perceived, we speculate that their world becomes less chaotic, and they have a higher probability of feeling good about themselves. For example, when does “coherence” become so rigid that parents' perception of their child is so skewed toward the parents' own internal state that any notion of relative objectivity becomes meaningless? We certainly believe that this study has highlighted some of the uncertainty about the notion of the identified patient in child therapy.

The Annual Program of the the Investigative Section

This program offers a forum in which clinical psychoanalytic concepts are examined in a multifaceted, systematic, and critical way. Our aim is to bring together into a single arena information about these concepts gathered from various sources. The more familiar path of exploring the foundations or evolution of a concept through clinical observations and conceptual scholarship is augmented by assessment yielding systematic empirical findings. The empirical research includes reports of the findings of IPTAR’s own programs as well as the work of other investigators, who we invite in to widen our perspective. In 2006, themes that were explored included: the concept of internalization of the psychoanalytic experience; the ordinary and extraordinary counter-transference; and the effectiveness of psychotherapy with children.

In 2007, the program will focus on the concepts of dissociation, therapeutic regression, and the idea of playing – a comparative study of observations on primates and their reference to “play” in the analytic treatment.