Chapter 6. The Mystic and The Group. Attention and Interpretation

It seems absurd that a psychoanalyst should be unable to assess the quality of his work. In attempting an assessment he has available popular repute (notoriously fickle and unreliable, and unsuited for use as a foundation for any judgement), anxiety, or a sense of satisfaction and well-being about a piece of work that appears to him to be well done. This last is probably as reliable a foundation as any, but is subject to doubt and misgiving. The only other person well placed to have an opinion is the analysand. His opinion is likewise a matter for scrutiny. The friendly or hostile feelings revealed converge towards a point where there should be a wise and compassionate, though critical, judgement. Instead there is an intuition, ‘That is truth, accept it.1’ Such formulations are not regarded as scientifically adequate and one craves something better. The craving cannot be satisfied unless it is recognized that standpoints such as religion, art, science, as we understand them today, are as unsatisfactory as the formulations truth, beauty, god, or future life.

The formulation is the end-product of a transformation; all transformations are associated with a particular vertex. The psychoanalyst is faced at an early date in his own development and at an early stage in the development of psychoanalysis itself with problems that arise because no vertex at present recognized is adequate. It is as absurd to criticize a piece of psychoanalytic work on the ground that it is ‘not scientific’, as it is to criticize it because it is ‘not religious’ or ‘not artistic’. It is not any of these things. Its failure to be so is a criticism; but its ‘success’ at being any of them would not remove the reproach.

The critical formulation for which there is no substitute is that it is ‘not psychoanalysis’.

It would seem that we are as far as ever from a positive result to the discussion; ‘psychoanalysis’ must be regarded as a term binding