You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The choice of axes may appear arbitrary without further reasons; it stems from the analytic situation itself.
The patient's activity most in evidence in an analysis is thinking. The analyst can see the use he makes of the analytic situation. He may appeal for help, exploit the possibilities of cruelty to the analyst, seek an outlet for love and generosity and so on. This he does by thinking silently, talking to the analyst, thinking aloud and occasionally by action. He makes statements classifiable under the headings of the vertical axis A–H. The information available for communication is selected, withheld, or expressed according to the use to which he wishes to put it. Since this is so the significance of the content of the communication can be assessed from the use, only one of the features of the patient's contribution, but it is a feature that is most continuously significant and is therefore worthy of attention, isolation and elevation as the 1–6 axis of the Grid.
Since self-knowledge is an aim of psychoanalytic procedure the equipment for attaining knowledge, the function and apparatus of pre-conception, must be correspondingly important. Growth and a capacity for growth are equally fundamental. The vertical axis (A–H) represents both the stages of growth and the function of pre-conception.
Representation of a process, such as growth continuing, by the headings A–H gives a misleading impression of discrete, clear-cut entities; transition from one to another must be assumed, for lack of evidence, probably to be gradual.
Choice of the Oedipus myth as a reservoir on which to draw for symbols to replace the horizontal axis (1–6) enables me to illustrate
a feature of the myth as a pre-conception. The Oedipus myth may be regarded as an instrument that served Freud in his discovery of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis as an instrument that enabled Freud to discover the Oedipus complex. I turn now to the part played by the myth, or its counterparts in α- and β-element