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THE FOLLOWING REPORT is oriented to the discussion of a specific problem in genetic semiotics, i.e., how those states of human relatedness which effectively bind human beings into persisting groups emerge.2 The methodology of study is clearly "unscientific" in the ordinary sense of replicable experimental procedures. States of human relatedness which are most important in group formation are idiosyncratic, unique, non-replicable. It is quite impossible for the human being to fall in love, or to undergo salvation in any religious system, or to become illuminated or to experience the Aha-Erlebnis in a replicable or reversible fashion. Human relatedness is essentially irreversible and non-replicable.
This inexorable fact, put in formal terms in the metaphor of "time's arrow" used to refer to entropy, or in poetic metaphor in Omar Khayyam's statement that no number of tears will erase a single word of the history written by the "magic finger, " is that human life moves so that it cannot be revised. What happens later is always a superimposition, never a reformulation or a re-creation. For this reason, psychotherapy is a severely limited "therapeutic" method. It is not possible to reconstruct an unsatisfactory parental relation; one can instead only work to construct as useful a preceptorial relation as possible at a time which must (for many early processes) be inappropriate.