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I want to discuss something which seems to be far removed from the topics with which we are concerned. In recent years there has been a mechanical development in astronomy analogous to the discovery of the telescope. Hitherto astronomy has been limited by what can be seen by the visual apparatus of the human being when extended by powerful instruments like the two-hundred-inch reflector at Palomar. It has now been further extended by the discovery of radio astronomy. Radio astronomers have discovered what they call ‘black holes’ in the spatial counterpart of the astronomical field; they believe that the ‘black hole’ is the space where a star has become so concentrated that it has fallen in on itself – it has collapsed. Where there used to be a star there is now a ‘black hole’ which, they suspect, is the source of immense power.
I am familiar with a psychoanalytic theory of the human mind which sounds like the astronomical theory of the ‘black hole’ – as far as I can understand astronomical formulation. Why should a psychoanalyst invent a theory to explain a mental phenomenon and, independently, the astronomers elaborate a similar theory about what they think is a black hole in astronomical space? Which is causing which? Is this some peculiarity of the human mind which projects it up into space, or is this something real in space from which derives this idea of space in the mind itself? Perhaps someone may have time and the inclination to investigate this ‘black hole’. Of course, the investigation might result in a negative discovery, a discovery which made it unnecessary to look further; or perhaps psychoanalysts have already suspected a peculiarity about the human mind, and if their suspicion is correct it will lead to still further psychoanalytic investigation and theories. I have used this idea of modern cosmology as a
model for psychoanalysis, but I would also use psychoanalysis as the starting point of an investigation of the human mind.
Let us look at somethi