July 28, 1999. Charles Brenner honors me by taking issue with a point I made in my article about the meaninglessness of asserting the universality of compromise formation. However, I hope my response to him can be seen as part of a much broader issue in science, one that I have addressed in The Prisonhouse of Psychoanalysis (1990) and that perhaps finds its best formulation in Karl Popper (1994).

Brenner's position seems to be that all mental acts are compromise formations constructed from our psychic agencies. It therefore seems fair to say that his letter is a compromise formation, just as are my response and, indeed, my commentary on this response. One cannot ever swing free of this network of theoretical explanation, but after a while it ceases to be a matter of concern or interest. Essentially, to apply