Pathways for psychoanalysis.

Pathways for Psychoanalysis is the lead essay in the book
Who Owns Psychoanalysis?, which was shortlisted for the Gradiva Prize in the United States for the best collection of psychoanalytical essays published in 2004. The essay raises questions of the relation of the methods of psychoanalysis to philosophy and science. It adopts the technique of Imre Lakatos in his Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge University Press, 1976) in order to construct an account of research methodology in mathematics and in psychoanalysis. Questions of the relation between conceptual and clinical problems in psychoanalysis, as well as questions of variations in psychoanalytical technique, are approached by this means. A historical reconstruction of the way that research themes have been broached within the British Psychoanalytical Society then raises the question of the lack of studies of the structure of language in this particular research tradition in the human sciences.