Presenter: Abbot Bronstein, PhD

The Comparative Clinical Methods Working Party Group started by David Tuckett and a group of European Psychoanalysts and brought to APsA and NapSac IPA institutes by Abbot Bronstein about 17 years ago, is a way to explore and study the implicit and explicit clinical methods psychoanalysts use in doing clinical psychoanalysis. The project has collected over 200 clinical cases in North America, Europe and South America. The groups consist of 15 psychoanalysts listening over 2 days to a colleague present detailed clinical sessions. The group uses a 2 step model to first describe the ways an analyst intervenes and then uses that material to describe the analysts theory of clinical work along a number of variables, from their theory of ‘what is wrong’ (descriptive diagnosis) to ‘what furthers the process” (their theory of therapeutic action). The project also looks at how analysts have conceptualized such analytic concerns like how they use and define ‘transference’, the “here and now”, the ‘analyst as a good or new object”.

This workshop will introduce participants to the research, the concepts and the method of descriptive study using vignettes from established cases.