Chapter 18. Learning from Experience

1 In the work done here (K activity) I have resorted to abstraction, in contrast to that reverse process of concretization by which words cease to be abstract signs but become things themselves. To demonstrate relationship adequately, abstraction and formalization are essential.

2 The problem is not merely the use of words already invested with a penumbra of associations to describe an unprecedented situation; it is that this penumbra of associations has been acquired in pursuit of the establishment of a mental relationship with concrete objects. This pursuit, in the development of the individual, is far less exacting than the attempt to establish a mental relationship with a personality either the individual's own or that of another person. The senses present the personality with material on which work has to be done to produce what Freud calls the “conscious awareness attached to them”, that is to the sense data. But it is hard to believe that sense data, as ordinarily understood, could bring much material of value when the object of the senses is an emotional experience of a personality (to whomever it may belong). The senses may be able in a state of fear or rage to contribute data concerning the heart-beat, and similar events peripheral, as we see it, to an emotional state. But there are no sense-data directly related to psychic quality, as there are sense-data directly related to concrete objects. Hypochondriacal symptoms may therefore be signs of an attempt to establish contact with psychic quality by substituting physical sensation for the missing sense data of psychic quality. It seems possible that it was in response to his awareness of this difficulty that Freud felt disposed to postulate consciousness as the sense-organ of psychic quality. I have

no doubt whatever of the need for something in the personality to make contact with psychic quality.

3 For personalities that seem to be incapable of true dreaming, the border-line psychotic and psychotic parts