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July 25, 1988
In their critique of Narrative Truth and Historical Truth(Spence, 1982), Sass and Woolfolk (1988) appeal to the "hermeneutic claim that prereflective experience is itself patterned and meaningful" (p. 445). This claim parallels J. Lacan's famous assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language, and Freud's (1900) claim in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams that the mechanisms of the primary process can account for the stuff of dreams. If infantile and/or prereflective experience does indeed contain a formal structure, then there is method in the psychoanalytic approach because transformation of these structures will appear in the patient's productions and we can reason from the latter to the former. Our reasoning, furthermore,