Chapter 1. Introduction. Attention and Interpretation

I doubt if anyone but a practising psychoanalyst can understand this book although I have done my best to make it simple. Any psychoanalyst who is practising can grasp my meaning because he, unlike those who only read or hear about psychoanalysis, has the opportunity to experience for himself what I in this book can only represent by words and verbal formulations designed for a different task. They were developed from a background of sensuous experience. Reason is emotion's slave and exists to rationalize emotional experience. Sometimes the function of speech is to communicate experience to another; sometimes it is to miscommunicate experience to another. Sometimes the object is to achieve access to, and permit access from, a good spirit; conversely, to deny access to a bad spirit. The vocabulary forged from such material serves, though inadequately, when, as in psychoanalytic practice, the object being studied is present. In mathematics, calculations can be made without the presence of the objects about which calculation is necessary, but in psychoanalytic practice it is essential for the psychoanalyst to be able to demonstrate as he formulates. This is not possible the moment the conditions for psychoanalysis, in the narrow technical sense, do not exist. Some of us have sought to extend psychoanalytic method so that it can be employed in a group setting. Such a development, if it can be done without mutilation of the fundamental character of psychoanalytic method, would initiate the change from private to public communication. Language does just that in the domain of sensible experience. Poetic and religious expressions have made possible a degree of ‘public-ation’ in that formulations exist which have achieved durability and extensibility. To say the same thing differently, the carrying power of the statement has been extended in time and in space. Vixere

fortes ante Agamemnona multi,1 and Not marble, nor the guilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this