Intensive studies of patients and the experiences of investigators and clinicians

Mental processes, normal or abnormal, are complex and multifaceted, needing to be viewed from diverse perspectives. But our field has split increasingly into two discrete groups. One group includes those investigators and clinicians who are often seen as most scientific and have restricted themselves more and more exclusively to directly observable, generally superficial phenomena and patients as classified according to those phenomena. Such variables can be reliably rated, a crucial aspect of any scientific endeavor. But in this group there has been a tendency to be like the person who lost the keys in the middle of the block but looked for them at the corner because "the light is better here." Those of us in this group have tended to act as though, if we can't measure a phenomenon with relative ease, it doesn't exist--potentially the antithesis of an adequate science. Others, and they have become rarer, have focused on understanding the psychological processes of individuals with mental disorder in great depth, while paying less attention to questions of scientific approaches to proof.