Does psychoanalysis treat passive receptacles with disembodied entities?

Thinking about some assumptions behind

evidence based practice initiatives:

Barry Dauphin, Ph.D.

Dr. Dauphin utilizes computer gaming as a metaphor for the EBT movement, suggesting that manualized, research-derived treatment represents good treatment for an imaginary character, i.e., the average patient. EBT risks leading psychotherapists to cede intellectual and professional responsibility. Most books on psychotherapy are not meant to be followed in some lock-step fashion.  Yet, the EBT movement looks to create more rigid sets of procedures for specific diagnoses, which has enormous implications for definitions of ethical practice. The procedure and the diagnosis (abstractions) are placed in the foreground, while the human beings are relegated to error variance.

Psychotherapy researchers produce studies that show particular kinds of measurable changes for particular people with particular diagnoses within a limited time frame under conditions of strong demand characteristics in the studies. They can sell the package as the treatment for the diagnosis, regardless of the large number of unknowns and regardless of whether other ways of working have not been looked at in the same way. The package is attractive to legislators, regulators, and insurance bureaucrats because it also promises a form of cost containment. He argues that psychoanalysis conceives of mental functioning as a complex system that is not controllable in the way so many bottom-liners or outcome researchers hope.  Psychoanalysis is generally applied in a manner that incorporates reacting to unpredictable. 

Barry Dauphin, Ph.D. is president of MSPP and of Section IV. He is the author of Tantalizing Times: Excitements, Disconnect, and Discontents in Contemporary American Society, (2006), Peter Lang Publishing. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Detroit Mercy. Dr. Dauphin maintains a psychoanalytic practice in Birmingham, Michigan.