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What is the interpretation of this cup that I am holding in my hand? My interpretation could be classified on the Grid as E1, that is to say, an interpretation in sophisticated form. I could call it an element in a sentential calculus. There are, I am sure, many other interpretations which would probably be better placed in some other Grid category.
[Silence]
It seems that the combined wisdom of this group has no interpretation to offer. We should be stimulated to wonder why silence is the group's response to this particular problem. If this occurred in analysis with an individual (one could consider the individual as being represented by a group) and I wanted to talk about the poly-faceted characteristics of that personality, I would need a large group of people to give me a visual image of that personality. I could then regard anything that that individual said or did as a statement made, or not made, by only one of the people in that group. That one person would still not be known to me any more than I know one facet of the silent individual. I might feel that although the silence remained the same (what I would call K), the element ξ (the variable) had changed but would remain without a value.
Falling back on my classifications and verbalizations, one could say that the psychoanalytic vertex was too gross, too macroscopic, in the same way that a molecular formulation is on too large a scale for dealing with electrons or neutrons. On the other hand, suppose one tried to formulate it in terms of the very small, then the group of these elements would form a constant conjunction of elements which I could not distinguish the one from the other. The one mental element would, for my purposes, be indistinguishable from the other because
the tiny element of the human personality has not been described by anyone. Nobody can say what a mental atom is.
The language and formulations which have to be used by the psychoanalyst were, all of them, forged for different kinds of inv