Fromm, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (1935) (I)
Erich Fromm wrote this piece in 1935, while still on relatively friendly terms with his Frankfurt School peers and, one imagines, under their influence. In it, Fromm does a number of things: he offers a useful gloss on the concepts and principles of psychoanalysis, as it was then understood; he reconstructs the historical context — economic, political, more broadly social — that implicitly shaped the psychoanalytic self-understanding; and he develops a critique of that self-understanding, and the clinical practice based upon it, both of which are problematically entangled in that historical context. The critique is internal or “immanent” inasmuch as Fromm judges Freud’s position in terms of its own ideals and aims. Ultimately, argues Fromm, Freud’s clinical recommendations — organized around “tolerance” and related “liberal” norms — conflict with Freud’s own objectives, namely, the effort to release repressions and “make the unconscious conscious.” In short, Fromm critiques Freudian “means” in the name of Freudian “ends.”
In this entry and the following ones, I will take the stages of Fromm’s account in turn: his selective summary of the Freudian “position”; his description of the clinical attitude — “tolerance” — suggested by Freud and the classical tradition; his identification of the socio-historical “content” of this tolerance, which establishes the value-horizon for classical analysis and imposes limitations on clinical efficacy; and his critique of classical therapeutic norms for their unreflective collusion with this value-horizon.
The essay’s first section (149-152) is restricted to recapitulating the main ideas of psychoanalysis, theoretical and clinical — though even here Fromm’s emphasis is selective, and he embroiders his exposition with revisions and criticisms of his own. He begins, uncontroversially, with the claim that psychoanalysis “is based on the uncovering of unconscious tendencies that lead to symptom formation or…neurotic character traits” (149), while continuing — in a slightly more tendentious vein — that the “most important cause of repression,” or the expulsion of these “tendencies” from consciousness in the first place, “is anxiety” (149). But he now, in what is surely an innovative gesture, differentiates this repression-occasioning anxiety into several “types” and, moreover, takes the liberty of ranking their relative pathogenic values. Thus we are invited to distinguish, in ascending significance, (a) the “fear of external force” — by which Fromm must mean “castration threats,” real or imagined; (b) the fear of “los[ing] the sympathy and love” of intimates; (c) fear of losing “one’s self-respect”; (d) finally — the substantial innovation of these passages, though Fromm does not frame it this way — fear of losing social esteem or acceptance. So Fromm writes:
“Generally, repressions only take place when an impulse is condemned not only by a single person, or even by several individuals, but by the social group to which the person in question belongs. In this case, in addition to the threat of external punishment, and to losing the love of the individual most important to the person in question, there is the danger of isolation and of the loss of social support. It seems that this danger produces more anxiety in most people than the one previously mentioned, and that this social isolation is the most important source of repression” (149)
Yet whatever the cause, object, or profundity of the anxiety, the mechanism is much the same: some impulse or package of impulses, originally conscious, seem in practice to evoke such anxiety — because of their effect on significant others in one’s environment — that they must be “repressed,” banished from awareness, where they nonetheless persist as “unconscious.” Repressed impulses are by this definition those the expression of which, hence ultimately even the awareness of which, are felt to imperil their bearers. The power of mind that prevents the re-emergence into awareness of these repressed impulses — which, so to speak, secures and continually renews the repression — is called “resistance.” Since an analysis is dedicated to consciously accessing the unconscious, hence lifting the repressions obstructing that access, it has centrally to do with this “resistance" — all the defensive means at the patient’s disposal for thwarting an analysis, for keeping these impulses unconscious.
Drawing blanks in the midst of free association or flight from distressing material; sudden anger towards the analyst and the analysis itself; illnesses or other symptoms that prevent the patient from attending sessions — all of these may be expressions of resistance. The appearance of these resistances is, Fromm emphasizes, neither an unfortunate accident nor a premonition of clinical failure, but rather “the most reliable signal that repressed material has been touched, and that one is not merely moving about on the psychic surface” (150). The whole substance of analysis, then, consists in eliciting these resistances, in order to address and overcome them. (“Transference” is the most important instrument in this program.)
What exactly is required, though, “in working one’s way through the resistance to the repressed material” (150)? Or again, more specifically: which characteristics of an analyst, and of an analytic situation, will best help in dissolving the resistances, so liberating the repressed impulses into consciousness?
The answer to these questions is connected, of course, to the original problem, namely, “which factors the strength of the resistance depends on” (150). As we saw above, anxiety of a particular sort drives impulses from awareness; it is finally this same anxiety which, via resistance, holds the repression in place. The strength of resistance, then — the necessary analytic obstacle — is a measure of the anxiety surrounding the repressed content. It follows that the effort to weaken the patient’s resistances must at the same time address this anxiety.
Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (IV)
As Freud now reiterates, the direct, verbal replies of the patient — reflecting as they do the conscious perspective — are never reliable indices of “correct" and “incorrect.” “Yes” and “No” may well, and often do, mean any number of things. Where should the truth-seeking analyst look, then, in order to ground speculation in something less “ambiguous”?
“It appears, therefore, that the direct utterances of the patient after he has been offered a construction afford very little evidence upon the question whether we have been right or wrong. It is of all the greater interest that there are indirect forms of confirmation which are in every respect trustworthy” (263)
But the problem of interpretation, for all the ingenuity of Freud’s argument, is hardly dissolved in this way. We may certainly distinguish better from worse, more from less plausible, as we go about gathering and assembling evidence. Yet this would not, finally, absolve us of the practical art involved — that is to say, precisely the work of interpretation. We may join Freud in believing that our constructions are “validated” by certain indirect “productions” of the patient: slips, dreams, associations, transferential behaviors, and like. (These signal the construction has “landed,” or has been acknowledged and absorbed by the patient’s unconscious.) And this class of validation is surely better than nothing, as an answer to the question of non-tendentious, durable criteria in psychoanalysis. Again, as Freud puts it:
“Only the further course of the analysis enables us to decide whether our constructions are correct or unserviceable. We do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection.” (265)
Nonetheless, an obvious question remains: how do we determine whether any given “production” in the “further course of the analysis” constitutes the sought-after confirmation? Which of course is precisely to demand, once again: by what criteria are these things to be measured?
Let us imagine an example of the testing-procedure Freud adumbrates, which for clarity’s sake we have simplified into discrete stages — even while noting that Freud himself indicates analysis is in practice never so tidy:
A patient shows up late for several consecutive sessions, and the analyst feels emboldened to interpret, “Your behavior unconsciously expresses hostility.”
The patient, let us say, replies with an emphatic “No,” together with a “rationalization” along the lines of, “The traffic has — quite by chance — been atypically congested the last days, which has prevented my prompt arrival.”
The analyst, following Freud’s example, reserves judgment as to whether or not the interpretation is correct — the patient’s “No,” and his way of consciously explaining his behavior, cannot determine the interpretation’s “truth,” one way or the other. This “No” is “ambiguous.”
So the analyst waits for “indirect” confirmation of the interpretation, in the form of the patient’s spontaneous “productions” following the communication.
Let us suppose that the analyst’s restraint is rewarded by a dream recounted by the patient in the following session — a dream expressing fairly undisguised aggression towards the analyst.
The analyst accordingly considers his interpretation vindicated by a “production” that — indirectly — provides “evidence” of the attributed “unconscious hostility,” in as plain a form as we could hope to encounter it.
Now, if we do accept something like this reconstruction as exemplary of Freud’s interpretation testing-procedure, let us then ask ourselves: what really is the epistemic status of this indirect evidence — in this case, the dream that ostensibly corroborates the original interpretation?
A dream, psychoanalysts suppose — as well as slips and other “symptoms,” for that matter — expresses in manifest form the unconscious, latent layers of mind. But why do we believe this? The answer can only be that we believe this about dreams because of Freud’s arguments based on his interpretations of dreams.
And what about the particular dream recounted by the patient? I have not said what it was; I merely said that it expressed “fairly undisguised aggression against the analyst.” But what sort of dream meets such a description? Perhaps the patient dreamt he felt angry at his analyst and, further, attacked the latter with a hammer. If this dream doesn’t constitute “fairly undisguised aggression,” it is difficult to say what would. But are matters ever so simple?
The very “grammar” of primary process, to which dreams submit, precludes anything like unambiguous, “hard and fast” evidence. The patient’s unconscious thoughts have ex hypothesi been disfigured by displacement, condensation, inversion, and the like. Hence the elements of even so “undisguised” a dream as the one I’ve invented might, on Freud’s own terms, conceal their opposites: the “analyst" in the dream might represent the patient himself, the hostility might express affection, and so on. In any event, the determinate meaning of this dream must itself finally answer to the patient’s associations regarding its individual elements — associations which, scrambled by “resistance,” make interpretation, not less, but more complicated.
But this means: everything depends upon the additional, rolling accumulation of “indirect evidence,” the totality of which might well gradually converge on interpretations and reconstructions that accommodate the most data in the most self-consistent form. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that these interpretations and reconstructions will ultimately be founded, not on extra-interpretive “truth makers” — objective evidence providing the unambiguous “Yes” and “No” that patients cannot deliver directly — but on further interpretations and reconstructions. Once we have divested of authority the patient’s first-person reports regarding the contents of their own minds, we seem to have relinquished any hope of recovering a satisfying criterial “replacement.” Certainly we cannot arbitrarily call a halt to the chain of interpretations, with recourse to some putative “fact of the matter.” For it will always be open to the skeptic to counter: how exactly have you come to that “interpretation”? Note bene: not that scientific judgment.
Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (III)
Freud now continues his defense of the analytic, “interpretive” method against charges of arbitrariness and unfalsifiability. He clarifies: “[W]e are not at all inclined to neglect the indications that can be inferred from the patient‘s reaction when we have offered him one of our constructions” (262). The analyst, accused of “invariably twisting his [i.e. the patient’s] remarks into a confirmation” (262), must rather pursue an examination that is “not so simple” (262).
In the following passages, Freud suggests that “Yes” and “No” introduce distinct ambiguities, hence raise different difficulties for the analyst. The patient’s “Yes” — “Your reconstruction of my past is correct” — may reflect an authentic validation, but it may just as easily, perhaps more easily, represent resistance. The patient’s unconscious strategy is then something like, 'I will assent to this reconstruction of my past, and so forestall any further inroads into the genuinely repressed, hence more alarming layers of mind.’ So Freud concludes, in a useful embellishment of the “fecundity” thesis, with the following statement:
“The Yes‘ has no value unless it is followed by indirect confirmations, unless the patient, immediately after his ‘Yes’, produces new memories which complete and extend the construction. Only in such an event do we consider that the Yes‘ has dealt completely with the subject under discussion.” (262)
We may quibble here with Freud’s qualifier — that the sought-after confirmation must arrive “immediately after his ‘Yes’,” in the form of additional, related memories. After all, a moment earlier, Freud is perfectly willing to allow cases in which the “reaction is postponed” (261), which would make the “immediacy” desideratum unnecessary and potentially misleading. (On the other hand, it would be difficult to maintain that only a “No,” and never a “Yes,” may induce postponed confirmation.)
This quibble notwithstanding, Freud’s point is well-taken, since in principle it enables us to discriminate a “resistant” affirmation, devised to throw an analyst off the scent, from a genuine one. The recognition of a construction by the patient’s unconscious “announces” itself by generating fresh material in the neighborhood of that construction. By contrast, Freud implies that an affirmation motivated essentially by resistance would not be accompanied by any spontaneous issue of memories that both validate and amplify the construction.
(Can we not imagine a patient who inadvertently fabricates memories that echo and fill out the analyst’s conjectures, from some combination of motives — say, suggestion, an eagerness to please the analyst, or even resistance itself? This is not a possibility that Freud seems to be aware of, still less one he addresses. Nonetheless, in light of scandals surrounding false “recovered memories,” it is an objection that even charitable readers of Freud may want to raise.)
The patient’s “Yes,” then, is questionable for the reasons Freud describes, and the analyst ought not to receive it as a definitive, or even a tentative confirmation of a construction. All the more, then, will these scruples apply to the patient’s “No,” which “is indeed of even less value” (262) for the purposes of verification. Only in “rare cases,” Freud proposes, is a “No” an “expression of a legitimate dissent” (262). This claim seems to imply at least two things:
By the time a conjecture is formulated and communicated by a conscientious analyst, it must contain some prima facie truth which a patient cannot legitimately reject, at least summarily.
Even where the conjecture is wrong, as a rule the patient’s unconscious — the only arbiter, after all, that matters — simply would not express its rejection in this manner, that is, with a simple “No.” (This may be an adjunct of Freud’s contemporaneous thesis that “negation” has no meaning or reality for the unconscious.)
So Freud continues:
“Far more frequently it expresses a resistance which may have been evoked by the subject-matter of the construction that has been put forward but which may just as easily have arisen from some other factor in the complex analytic situation.” (262-3)
In fact, to repeat, even when the conjecture is altogether mistaken, the patient’s “No” is more likely to signal resistance than a legitimate recognition of its falseness. Freud continues that, where the “No” is grounded in something more than resistance — where its validity is not merely fortuitous — it indicates that the conjecture is not altogether mistaken, but simply “incomplete.” Freud’s point here is intriguing:
“Since every such construction is an incomplete one, since it covers only a small fragment of the forgotten events, we are free to suppose that the patient is not in fact disputing what has been said to him but is basing his contradiction upon the part that has not yet been uncovered. As a rule he will not give his assent until he has learnt the whole truth — which often covers a very great deal of ground. So that the only safe interpretation of his ‘No’ is that it points to incompleteness; there can be no doubt that the construction has not told him everything.” (263)
What are we to make of this position? Freud does not provide an example of a patient’s ‘No’ that points, not to a construction’s patent falseness, but to its incompleteness. He might have several things in mind. A construction such as, “You witnessed your parents having sex when you were an infant,” might be deemed “incomplete” inasmuch as the exact circumstances of the “scene” have not yet been enumerated. (A complete reckoning might accordingly run: “At age one and half, while in your parents’ bedroom, you witnessed them in such-and-such a sexual configuration” — as things turn out in Freud’s “Wolf Man” account.) But the construction might also be viewed as incomplete inasmuch as it is un-supplemented by other, equally general constructions. (In this case, the initial conjecture might be “completed” with the lines: “Before witnessing this scene, you felt your provided all gratification to your mother,” and other, similar addenda.)
Perhaps Freud intended both types of incompleteness. In either case, however, we will certainly want to ask: on what basis does Freud distinguish the one, unequivocal ‘No’ (‘Your conjecture is wrong in toto —nothing like the scene you’ve posited ever occurred’), from the other ‘No’ (‘Your conjecture applies only to a part of my history’)? And then, of course: on what basis does Freud routinely decide in favor of the second?
After all, from the patient’s conscious perspective, the ‘No’ plainly means the first, and emphatically not the second. It is perhaps too obvious to emphasize, but a patient who consciously recognized a conjecture as “partially correct” would not say “No” at all, but rather something like, “Yes — but there are other parts that must be filled in.” So Freud must mean that, nonetheless, from the unconscious perspective, a ‘No’ does announce “Yes, but…” Both Freud’s distinction between “Nos” and his conviction that the “Yes, but…” signification is what generally obtains, awaits some separate justification. Finally, only Freud’s experience with “indirect” evidence licenses the distinction and his conviction regarding it.
Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (II)
We have been discussing Freud’s position on the analytical “construction” of a patient’s biography — at least as that biography was originally experienced and thence repressed. The example Freud offers is of course prototypical, as we saw in the last entry:
“‘Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you,’ . . . and so on” (261)
Naturally, the analyst will want to know whether, and in what respects, that reconstruction matches “the facts.” But this is a tricky business, since the patient is as yet in no position to measure the analyst’s hypothesis against memories he has, Freud himself insists, repressed.
Now, strictly speaking, Freud is discussing the truth-aptness of “constructions” communicated to patients throughout their analyses, that is, conjectures regarding forgotten memories. But presumably his account would look similar vis-à-vis particular “interpretations” of, say, unconscious impulses. For we are evidently not in an appreciably different situation when assessing these latter. After all, how else might we go about testing conjectures such as: “Your tardiness is an expression of hostility’; or “That ‘accident’ in your speech — you said ‘love’ instead of ‘hate’ — is in reality a ‘slip' betraying your unconscious attitude”? Let us compare the two situations:
Certainly, Freud’s hypothetical patient is not in conscious possession of that precise memory which could authenticate the analyst’s “construction,” e.g. “Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother…” And for good reason: were the patient privy to such conscious memories, both the construction and the whole of analysis would be redundant.
Yet neither, according to Freud, do the patient’s conscious assessments of particular “interpretations” — Yay or Nay — count for much. The patient might respond, “My tardiness expresses no such hostility”; or, conversely, “My substitution of ‘love’ for ‘hate’ does betray some affection, until now disclaimed, for my putative enemy.” The analyst is in either case unmoved, and for the analogous reason that, were the impulse thus “interpreted” consciously accessible to the patient, in some uncomplicated way, that interpretation would — paradoxically — be superfluous.
In both cases, therefore, we will expect some answer to the question of criteria: against what kinds of “data” shall we measure our interpretations and constructions, if not the verbal assent of the patient who — consciously, at least — enjoys no special epistemic privileges in this regard?
As I noted above, the question of criteria frames the essay, which promises “a detailed account of how we are accustomed to arrive at an assessment of the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ of our patients” (257). Thus Freud announces, in so many words, that the patient’s verbal evaluations do not themselves constitute definitive criteria, but must answer to something more reliable, less clouded by the patient’s self-occlusion. Here again, over 30 years later, Freud is elaborating on a dilemma articulated already in An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria:
“It is of course not to be expected that the patient will come to meet the physician half-way with material which has become pathogenic for the very reason of its efforts to lie concealed; nor must the enquirer rest content with the first ‘No’ that crosses his path” (18)
In the middle section of “Constructions,” Freud begins to gesture towards the criterion he has in mind. “The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him” (260), a joint-labor that continues when the analyst “constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him” (260) — that is, a flood set loose precisely by the initial “communication.” To the worry that an analyst may invent and share a false construction, thus “risking the success of the treatment” (261), Freud replies that the mistaken analyst runs no such risk: “What in fact occurs in such an event is rather that the patient remains as though he were untouched by what has been said” (261), and indeed — taking this “unperturbed" reaction as a measure — “if nothing further develops we may conclude that we have made a mistake” (261).
With these lines, Freud anticipates the considered view he will in a moment defend explicitly: a construction is demonstrably “correct” if, and to the extent that, it “works upon” the patient, in such a way that it induces an eruption of “fresh material.” By contrast, a construction is demonstrably mistaken when, after waiting for that effect, the analyst perceives that the patient remains “untouched” by the communication, and there is no “fresh material pouring in upon him.”
Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (I)
Freud’ frames his “Constructions” essay as a rebuttal to critics charging psychoanalysis with a bankrupt epistemology — one that, as Karl Popper will later argue, cannot be falsified. Psychoanalytic interpretations are, so runs the criticism, impervious to refutation: either the patient affirms the analyst’s interpretation explicitly, or else rejects it — that is, evinces a “resistance” that likewise ratifies the analyst’s conjecture (257).
What Freud emphasizes in the piece, however, is that — in point of fact — neither the patient’s “Yes” nor his “No” counts for very much in assessing an interpretation’s truth-value. Authentic validation emerges, if it emerges, only indirectly, in the form of a certain “fecundity” in the patient’s productions in response to the intervention: associations, dreams, fantasies, transferential behaviors, and — if all goes well — a remission of symptoms. Far from retreating to the unfalsifiable standpoint, as one unnamed critic puts, of “Heads I win, tails you lose” (257), psychoanalysis looks past both heads and tails, in favor of evidence that enjoys a certain “independence” from the passing views of analyst and patient alike.
Before coming to this rebuttal, though, Freud clarifies the more general problems and aims involved. To what sort of object, after all, do these “interpretations” properly apply? What, indeed, is the motivation for these interpretations in the first place? To answer these questions, Freud reminds us that the central objective of psychoanalysis consists in “inducing the patient to give up the repressions…belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition” (257). In the service of this objective — the lifting of repressions — the patient must somehow “be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten” (257-8). It is remarkable how closely these 1937 descriptions of the psychoanalytic program match those contained already in the 1905 Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud’s account of Dora:
“Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient's memory. These two aims are coincident. When one is reached, so is the other; and the same path leads to them both” (11)
In short, our objective is to lift the patient’s repressions. But this, paradoxically, involves the recovery of precisely those memories which have been repressed. How, then, does one go about generating these affect-laden recollections — the sine qua non of psychoanalytic progress? How does analysis help the patient recover what has by stipulation been repressed, hence what is not directly accessible to memory?
Analysis must look, in fact, to a range of materials, above all the patient’s “symptoms and inhibitions” (258) which, Freud argues, are in reality “a substitute for these things that he has forgotten” (258). “All kinds of things,” in fact, contribute to the analytical “reconstruction” of a biography otherwise blocked from view: dreams, associations, and repetitions in behavior “both inside and outside the analytic situation” (258) — most notoriously in the “relation of transference…established towards the analyst” (258). On the basis of all this “raw material,” which the patient “put[s] at our disposal” (258), the analyst may gradually “put together what we are in search of” (258). What we want to “reconstruct,” then, is “a picture of the patient’s forgotten years” that is “alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete” (258).
This, then, is the central “task” which falls to the analyst, namely, “to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it” (258-9). Just as the “archaeologist’s excavation” (259) recovers structures buried and lost, while piecing together the whole on the basis of often incomplete remains, so the analyst, through the “work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction” (259), likewise “draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behavior of the subject of the analysis” (259).
After developing a number of analogies (259-260) between archaeological and psychoanalytic “reconstructions” (while allowing several dis-analogies, too), Freud comes to the heart of his argument — equal parts terminological clarification and technical suggestion.
“The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him, deals with it in the same way and proceeds in this alternating fashion until the end. If, in accounts of analytic technique, so little is said about ‘constructions,’ that is because ‘interpretations' and their effects are spoken of instead. But I think that ‘construction’ is by far the more appropriate description. ‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten, in some such way as this: ‘Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you,’ . . . and so on” (260-61)
In fact, the quoted passage appears to distinguish between “interpretations” and “constructions” in several ways, both explicitly and implicitly.
Most explicitly, interpretations purportedly apply to “single elements” of the patient’s productions, and Freud cites as examples associations and parapraxes. If a patient shows up late to analysis, the analyst may “interpret” that particular act as a hostile gesture. By contrast, it seems, “constructions” are not restricted to single elements, but rather entail the organization of multiple elements into a “constellation” of some kind.
More implicitly, though equally important, an interpretation need not, on the evidence, directly evoke the forgotten history we would like ultimately to recover — even if it points the way to it. Again, the analyst may interpret a patient’s late arrival as unconsciously hostile without thinking or saying anything about its genesis in a history unknown to both analyst and patient. By contrast, once more, a “construction” does represent the patient’s repressed “prehistory” — presumably on the basis of some number of (now agglomerated) “interpretations.”
It is here that Freud addresses the well-known “falsifiability” charge against analytic procedure, and in doing so throws valuable light on the epistemic standing of psychoanalysis more generally. For how do we know when our conjectures have hit their mark? I will take up this question in the next post.