ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the relationship between research and psychoanalytic child psychotherapy. It notes the complex attitudes that psychoanalysis adopts towards the systematic gathering of data, and will attempt to understand the partial lack of past interest in systematic empirical work related to child therapy in terms of the clinical rootedness of the discipline. This first part of the chapter touches briefly on epistemological issues that affect all professionals practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, and considers various suggestions that have been advanced to address the epistemic problems inherent in psychoanalytic approaches. The second part of the chapter attempts to show how the conceptual challenges of modern psychodynamic thought may be at least partially addressed by extraclinical theory and research. The paper gives an example using evidence gathered from developmental psychopathology, in particular social cognition, which not only provides evidence that is at least consistent with many of the psychoanalytic model’s assumptions but also helps to organize psychoanalytic thought in some ways. I point to some key issues regarding the communication of psychoanalytically informed ideas within the wider community. Finally, I turn briefly to the external validation of psychodynamic thought, and point to some difficulties involved in conducting empirical studies of the outcome of psychodynamic child psychotherapy.
