ABSTRACT
Green's brief essay is clearly packed with an intricate array of interrelated conceptions, some stated directly, and even starkly, without the space for the elaboration that he could so richly provide, and some indicated only by passing allusion. Green does complain rightly that up to this point not a great deal in the way of psychoanalytic advance—in the sense of "major discovery"—has yet emerged from formal psychoanalytic research, and with this ruefully agree, though much hinges on definitional matters, what authors mean by "major discovery" and by "scientific advance". Given this fundamental agreement on the vantage point from which psychoanalytic research, or any other purportedly psychoanalytic activity, should be viewed. A proper assessment and response would indeed also require the elaboration that the limitations of space do not allow. The first theme is that of the conceptual (and methodological) difficulties of trying to do properly scientific psychoanalytic research in full harmony with the vital "spirit" of psychoanalysis.
