Empiricism, the Transference Neurosis, and the Function of the Selfobject: A Re-examination of the Dynamic Point of View

This alone would make the use of the analytic method in the analytic situation the via regia to the psychology of personality. In this setting, data do appear which are not, or not easily, accessible to other methods. This asset as to fact finding has, of course, a disadvantage in another respect: an observation an analyst makes may seem entirely credible to another analyst who possesses the necessary experience, an interpretation quite convincing, while the same observation may hardly appear credible, the same interpretation highly improbable or artificial, to one who approaches the field with a different method and in a different setting. For the analyst, one constant angle of his work is the observation of data and of sequences of data, the tentative interpretations (in search of the common element in such sequences), and the checking of his interpretations against the subsequent (and past) material. It is safe to say that the greater part of evidence for the psychoanalytic propositions still lies with this work.

As a theoretician noted for his precision and clarity of thought, Hartmann is generally and justifiably acclaimed; he is accorded a position of pre-eminence in the classical literature that is perhaps without peer. It is with this thought that I have selected a passage from his 1959 paper on “Psychoanalysis as a Scientific Theory” to introduce this essentially, though not exclusively, epistemological essay. The quotation, with its specific reference to the primacy of the empirical observational stance in psychoanalysis, also casts in sharp relief a specific epistemological issue devolving from empiricism. Such an issue necessarily involves the reciprocity between operation and conceptualization which must obtain in order to ensure the requisite rigor which characterizes all serious scientific enterprise. Thus, while endorsing the proposition that there is a unitary quality to