Measurement of motivational variables in psychotherapy

Abstract

Among many psychoanalysts quantification has acquired a bad reputation. They think of quantification or measurement as a destruction of the meaningfulness of the therapeutic interaction, as an insensitivity to vital processes of therapy, as a rather stupid and arrogant use of numbers. One can understand why they feel this way; there have been many misguided attempts at measuring psychoanalytic concepts. But in these misguided attempts, the troubles arose not from quantification, but from the erroneous applications of analytic theory. For example, the easy assumption that repression can be equated with forgetting is just plain wrong; and whether an investigator making this erroneous assumption uses quantification or not is quite beside the point.

The first draft of this chapter was written by Frank Auld, Jr., who is therefore listed as senior author. The material of this chapter is based on John Dollard and Frank Auld, Jr., Scoring Human Motives (Yale University Press, 1959), but various new data relating to the validity of the content-analysis system have been added.