Chapter 26. Learning from Experience

1 The terms Love, Hate and Knowing had precedent models. Link (See Chapter 14:2) can imply a model or an abstraction. The failure of the patient to solve his problems may in some cases depend on the fact that he employs models wrongly. In making his own model the analyst needs in such cases to be aware of and to lay bare the model used by the patient. The analyst's model must be such that it enables him to arrive at an interpretation of the facts that present themselves for scrutiny. If the analyst supposes that the patient's thinking is at fault and is at the source of his troubles he will need a model and a theory of thinking of his own; he will need a model for the patient's mode of thinking and he will need to deduce from that what the patient's model for thinking is. He may then compare his model and abstraction with the patient's. The patient who thinks words are things-in-themselves does not feel he is doing the same thing as we think he is doing when we say he is thinking. To compare the ordinary view of thinking with such a patient's it is necessary to find a suitable model and theory. One model has, as we have seen, a widespread distribution, the model derived from the emotional experience of the digestive system. There is ordinarily no need to discard this model though its failings are obvious – it can still help to be able to speak of “undigested facts”. But for a psychoanalytic investigation of thinking it is inadequate and some different model is needed. This need has become obvious in the psychoanalytic investigation of disorders of thought. Investigation of mental development shows that some individuals behave as if their model of thinking was not that of a healthy digestive system or perhaps of a digestive system at all. It is therefore necessary to discover what their model is.