ABSTRACT
Hartvig Dahl was a psychoanalyst-researcher, a man of original ideas and strong passions, whose entire career was devoted to empirically guided psychoanalytic inquiry. He was a strong advocate for microanalytic and collaborative research; this vision inspired the first international conference on Psychoanalytic Process Research Strategies held in 1985 in Ulm, Germany, as a pre-conference to the Hamburg IPAC. A psychotherapeutic talking cure relies essentially on a patient's storytelling. Thus, the principle of free association as the "basic rule" of psychoanalysis is to sample stories that are characteristic or typical of a person's emotional experiences. Everyone in the psychotherapy enterprise is inevitably committed to trying to understand the stories of patients' lives—the stories they tell people in treatment. The proceedings were published in the famous "blue book", legendary among psychoanalytic process researchers andhard to find. Meanwhile Wallerstein, deeply involved in the Psychotherapy Research Project, also joined the Psychiatry Department at the University of California in San Francisco, where he became chair.
