ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the distinctions and relations between clinical and extra-clinical research in psychoanalysis, and it positions these distinctions and relationships within their rich historical context. As Professor Leuzinger-Bohleber notes, this historical context includes the attempts by psychoanalysis, since its inception, to define and place itself within the larger scientific community. In between the generalisations that derive from induction and the probing of theories through deduction is the building of a model or theory for the inner workings of the system under study. Induction allows those models to be constructed, and the models allow predictions of the system’s behaviour when probed – when one or more elements or variables in the model change or are manipulated. Science is fundamentally a social activity, and the knowledge that science creates must be accessible to other disciplines and capable of adjudication if it is to extend beyond the deep and intimate knowledge created in the analytic situation with an individual patient.
