Many psychoanalysts believe it is impossible to conduct empirical research without eviscerating or trivializing psychoanalytic constructs, and past research efforts have all too often reinforced this view. A new method for studying personality and personality pathology is presented that challenges such beliefs. This method, the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP), captures the richness a...

Cognitive therapy for depression is common practice in today's National Health Service, yet it does not work well. Aaron Beck developed it after becoming disillusioned with the psychoanalytic theory and therapy he espoused and practised. But Beck's understanding of psychoanalysis appears to have been seriously flawed. Understood rightly, the psychoanalytic approach offers a cogent theory and th...

This paper focuses on the real relationship with the analyst in the psychoanalytic situation as an aspect of the therapeutic process that leads to change. The role of free association, clarification, and interpretation of the transference are taken for granted as major activities of the analyst, and the real relationship with him is seen as a complementary but important ingredient for change. I...

and the first interview give an interesting overview of Shevrin’s professional career. We learn how he first made contact with psychoanalysis in a military hospital in Oxford where he recovered from an injury he incurred when he was a soldier in Germany during World War 2. Reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams from the hospital library he was instantly fascinated and caught by what he re...

There are literally several books, dozens of psychoanalytic journals and hundreds of psychoanalytic articles published each month; with this flood of content it often seems an impossibility to separate wheat from chaff. As readers, our hope is that with each new article or book, the material will open unexpected ideational doors and thrust us into revisiting old issues or exploring new ones pre...

Although psychoanalysis once dominated psychology, evidence now points to the waning influence of psychoanalytic theory in psychological science, psychiatric diagnosis, undergraduate instruction, and graduate training. In this article I describe 7 self-destructive behaviors exhibited by psychoanalysts that contributed to the precipitous decline of psychoanalytic theory in recent years. I then o...