Chapter 16. Learning from Experience

1 I shall ignore L and H, and discuss K as it is important for the analyst and is the link that is germane to learning by experience. In the course of discussing it I hope also to take up further points which are relevant to linking but with which I have not so far been able to deal. My first point is that L or H may be relevant to K but that neither is by itself conducive to K. x K y, the analyst K the analysand, I K Smith; these are statements that represent an emotional experience. Like L and H, K represents an active link and has about it a suggestion that if x K y, then x does something to y; it represents a psychoanalytic relationship. As I propose to use it, it does not convey a sense of finality, a meaning that x is in possession of a piece of knowledge called y, but rather that x is in the state of getting to know y, and y is in a state of getting to be known by x. The statement x K y, in so far as it means that x has a piece of knowledge called y, falls in the category of a relationship between the person making the statement and also the person to whom it is made and a relationship with x and y about whom it is made.

2 In so far as it is a statement meaning that x is concerning himself to know the truth about y, it corresponds to statements of relationship that are said to be informed by a scientific outlook. The techniques employed by those who have a scientific outlook have achieved most success when y is an inanimate object. The conviction that a scientific outlook prevails in the relationship x K y is more easily maintained if y is inanimate and if x can be made to seem to approximate to the inanimate, for example x uses a machine. Truth value is felt to inhere in the record presented by a smoked drum or

the record of the human voice in a way that is not felt to be the case in the report of human judgement. The simplicity of this view is exposed on occasions when it is believed that a photographic record cannot yield the evidence available