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PSYCHOANALYSIS IS FUNDAMENTALLY SOUND at the empirical and systematic foundations.1 There, it can be shown, nothing is so intrinsically wrong, deficient, or beyond intelligibility, that continued empirical and systematic inquiry cannot correct for it during the study of the concrete, individual case. The existence of this capacity is, at present, warranted beyond question.
For psychoanalysis, as a coordinated structure of inquiry, is capable, first, of observing and defining, and then, of transforming and explaining, processes and patterns that relate the ongoing, conscious surface to the downgoing, unconscious ground of the experience of any two particular coparticipants. It is, as a direct result, fully capable of being used to explore and to work through the disturbed, distortive, and interlocking relations of that actual, therapeutic experience.
As an experience of therapy undergone, moreover, its focus of inquiry unfolds at the growing edge of processes and patterns that shape the working context for a long-term, intensive, deeply coparticipant effort. Both the psychoanalytic inquiry and the psychoanalytic experience do not, therefore, lack the psychic realism of those uniquely individual, intimately shareable processes and patterns.