Abstract
In recent years there has developed an increased general interest in the methods by which the efficacy of clinical therapies may be judged. The biomedical literature both in this country and abroad has contained many sophisticated essays on the methodology of the classical randomized controlled clinical trial and various alternatives to it.1Curiously, one specific clinical discipline, psychoanalysis with its extensive schools and variant forms of therapy, has until very recently been most reluctant to mount a clinical trial to determine the effectiveness of its modalities, though it has been criticized for not doing so by a number of philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It is not irrevelant on the more practical side to note that health insurance companies and the Federal government have become intensely interested in the question whether psychotherapy has any efficacy.2
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© 1983 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Schaffner, K.F. (1983). Clinical Trials: The Validation of Theory and Therapy. In: Cohen, R.S., Laudan, L. (eds) Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 76. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7055-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7055-7_10
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