You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
OSCAR WILDE ONCE SAID THAT ONLY superficial people insist on looking beneath the surface; which is not as superficial a remark as one might think. For it is the surface that manifests all that is splendidly unique and idiosyncratic about biological life, from the butterfly to man. As Adolf Portmann pointed out, it is the principle of nature that the surface manifestations of an organism, its appearance, should be both colorful and unique and that its internal organs should be both colorless and commonly held. (Portmann, 1964). Psychoanalysis, in its maligning of the surface, of the manifest content, has become a process much akin to plucking a duck. It is true that bereft of our individual plumage we are revealed to be, as Harry Stack Sullivan (Sullivan 1953) commented, more simply human than otherwise; but we are also deprived of the highly idiosyncratic personal patterning that renders each one of us as totally unique and singular as our fingerprints.
I would like to develop this point, that uniqueness is neither a biological nor psychological frippery. From the early Greeks on, science has always dealt with communalities, with an attempt to find principles and rules, "laws" which govern and order natural phenomena. Aesthetics was permitted its eccentricities, but science was expected to conform to the canons of logic and reason. This paradigm of Newtonian clockwork order began to deteriorate with both Einstein's relativity and quantum physics. Most recently in particle physics, the comforting pre-quantum physics world of elements and atoms broke down into something so resembling