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1 Attribution of a value to the term alpha-function is a task of psychoanalysis and can be achieved in no other way. Its status, as I discuss it here, is that of an unknown variable to be used to satisfy the need for a system of abstraction adequate to the requirements of psychoanalysis. This and related problems are objects of the enquiry; they are also instruments by which the enquiry is conducted.1 A distinction must be made between the concept of alpha-function and the realization which is felt to approximate sufficiently closely to the theory in which this concept is employed to warrant appropriation of the term alpha-function as a name, however temporary, for the realization.
2 The genesis of all abstraction is to be supposed, for purposes of analytic investigation, to be a factor in alpha-function. Such an hypothesis is compatible with the association of breakdown in alpha-function with predominance of beta-elements which are remarkable for their concreteness to a point where some patients
The process that the analyst is activating is, in the cases in which he is investigating disorders of thought, designed to investigate the same process in the patient. What psychoanalysts call phantasies are, in some cases at least, the present day survivals of what were once models that the patient formed to match his emotional experiences. In this respect the Oedipus myth is the survival of a model designed to match an infant emotional experience. If the case exhibits a disorder of thought it will be found that this model was never properly formed. As a result the oedipal situation will appear to be imperfectly developed or non-existent. Analysis of such a patient will reveal attempts, if the analysis is progressing, to formulate such a model. See also Frege, Grundgesetze (1952), p. 154, in which he discusses the concept that is, as it were, unsaturated.
regard words not as the names of things but as things-in-them-selves. The hypothesis must be matched against emotiona