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1 Suppose that the patient has produced a number of associations and other material. The analyst has available:
observations of the patient's material;
various emotional experiences of his own;
a knowledge of one or more versions of the myth of Oedipus1;
one or more versions of psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex;
other fundamental psychoanalytic theories.
Some aspects of the session will appear familiar; they will remind him of past experiences, analytical and otherwise. Others will seem to bear a resemblance to the oedipal situation. From these sources the analyst can form a model; the problem is to decide whether the analyst is confronted by a realization of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus theory does not correspond closely to what a physicist would call a scientific deductive system but can be formulated to qualify for inclusion in such a category. Its weakness as a member of this class is likely to be its lack of abstraction and the peculiar structure by which its elements are related to each other. In part this is due to the fact that the more concrete the elements the less they lend themselves to variation of combination.