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Let us endeavour to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we ought to complain. Whether to see life as it is will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation that is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from errour must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive.
I assume that the permanently therapeutic effect of a psychoanalysis, if any, depends on the extent to which the patient has been able to use the experience to see one aspect of his life, namely himself as he is. It is the function of the psychoanalyst to use the experience of such facilities for contact as the patient is able to extend to him, to elucidate the truth about the patient's personality and mental characteristics, and to exhibit them to the patient in a way that makes it possible for him to entertain a reasonable conviction that the statements (propositions) made about himself represent facts.
It follows that a psychoanalysis is a joint activity of patient and analyst to determine the truth; that being so, the two are engaged – no matter how imperfectly – on what is in intention a scientific activity.
But not at all, it might be objected by a painter; why should the two not be engaged in an artistic activity? An analysand who is a painter or a musician may indeed be hostile to the dominant role played by speech in analysis, and the hostility may include amongst its complexity of component strands some that could be related to a belief in the intrinsic superiority of art to science.
I shall exclude this problem because I wish to limit this to that aspect of the psychoanalysis which can be made explicit verbally – although I may on some other occasion investigate the implications for psychoanalysis of the artist's claim to be concerned with truth,
including the claim of the artist in words. I content myself with