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An advantage of believing that observations are the foundation of scientific method is that the conditions in which they are made can be stated and then produced. The simplicity of this has its appeal for the psychoanalyst: an analytic situation is presumed to exist and interpretations of the observations made in that situation are then reported. It is possible to believe that the analysis has a location in time and space: for example, the hours arranged for the sessions and the four walls of the consulting-room; that at such times and in such a place the analyst can make observations which he cannot do if the domain has not these limitations, or if ‘psychoanalytic observations’ do not conform to the conventional view of an observation. If I pictorialize the statement ‘the conventional view of an observation’ to be a container, like a sphere, and the ‘psychoanalytic observation’ as something that cannot be contained within it, I have a model that will do very well not only for the ‘conventional view’, to represent my feelings about a ‘psychoanalytic situation’, but also for the ‘psychoanalysis’ that it cannot contain. It will also serve as a model for my feelings about certain patients: I cannot observe Mr X because he will not remain ‘inside’ the analytic situation or even ‘within’ Mr X himself.
I have found theories of acting-out enlightening, but not enlightening enough; none of the theories known to me ‘contains’ the ‘facts’ by which I seek to be enlightened. My ‘facts’ gird against the framework of definition and theory which I seek to erect around them. The patient who is acting out cannot be ‘contained’ within existing formulations.
This is a characteristic of the mental domain: it cannot be contained within the framework of psychoanalytic theory. Is this a sign of defective theory, or a sign that psychoanalysts do not understand
that psychoanalysis cannot be contained permanently within the definitions they use? It would be a valid observation to say that p