Ask and it Shall be Given

Critics of psychoanalysis often ask for one, just one prediction made by Freud that has received confirming empirical evidence.

B13 1992: There is a parallel of the CCRTs about the therapist with the CCRTs about other people.

A necessary and expected parallel is based on Freud's (1912) central clinical observation about the transference template: the patterns that become expressed to the therapist have parallels with the pattern that is expressed to other people. Now, for the very first time, this parallel has been empirically shown for 35 patients from the Penn Psychotherapy Project between the CCRT for relationships with others and the CCRT for relationships with the therapist (Fried, Crits-Christoph, & Luborsky (1992).

The broader issue of the consistency of themes across different types of people, such as father versus mother, has been examined by Frevert et al (1995). This broader topic is basic to the CCRT because of the partly research-supported clinical expectation that narratives about different types of people will show some common themes across the different types of people.

They can feel free to thank me (and google, which actually turns this piece up on the first page for a search of empirical + transference) later.