ABSTRACT
Conceptual reflections—however unsystematic they may be—have a tradition in psychoanalysis that reaches back to Freud. Conceptual research, which is preoccupied with the question of how meanings change, sees itself more in the tradition of the second position, albeit proposing its own particular methodological way. The convictions that Popper formulated in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery remain an important methodological point of reference for many empiricists and re-emerge in modern variants of the hypothetico-deductive method. From a methodological point of view, two terms are central for the purpose of the argument—namely, "empirical", and "conceptual"; admittedly, these are unclear terms themselves and thus in need of some prior specification. Empirical research means all classical case studies produced on a clinical-psychoanalytic basis. The depth dimension refers to the theoretical connections: empirical regularities are replaced by mathematical laws, which in their turn become embedded in ever more comprehensive theories.
