Chapter 22. Learning from Experience

1 The writing of this book is a realization of K. The difficulties of the patient suffering from a “disorder of thought” are similar to those that beset scientists, and others concerned with the establishment of facts, in that they arise through failure to ascertain facts and so involve investigation of the nature of the failure. The failure of patients suffering from disorders of thought is patently within the personality. Psychoanalysis of that failure is impossible without understanding the problem of the philosopher of science and conversely his problem is incompletely stated without the aid of psychoanalytic experience of disorders of thought.1 Investigation of abstraction as a part of the psychoanalytic armoury will be by this two-fold approach. I shall first discuss abstraction as a factor of alpha-function in a K-link.

2 Let us suppose the infant repeats an emotional experience in which the following elements are constantly conjoined; the sight of a man, a sense of being loved by the man, a sense of wanting the man, an awareness of the repetition of mother's phrase, “That's Daddy.” “Da, da, da” says the child. “That's right; Daddy” says the mother. From the emotional experience the infant abstracts certain elements. What they are depends partly upon the infant. These abstracted elements are given a name – “Daddy” – in other situations in which the same elements appear to be conjoined; thus a vocabulary is established. This is not a description of fact; I give it the status of a model from which I abstract a theory, and expect to find that it is a representation to which

some realization corresponds. The theory I abstract is: Daddy is the name of an hypothesis.1 The hypothe