[Undated]: Need for Study of Scientific Method. Cogitations

Though we are aware that any knowledge at which we arrive is the result of a process on our part, we do not reflect on the nature of the process – at any rate in any systematic way – and make it the object of a special study. But sooner or later knowledge of our mistakes and the desire to be sure that we are getting the genuine article, i.e. something that is really knowledge, lead us to reflect on the process. We do so, prompted by the hope that we can discover the proper process, i.e. that in which we shall be safe from error, or at least to determine within what limits we can carry out such a process. But in the end we find ourselves having to ask whether we are capable of knowing at all and are not merely under the illusion of thinking that we can know.

Prichard points out that in ordinary life when we are seeking knowledge, our interest is chiefly absorbed in the nature of what we are trying to know, and not in the process by which we try to get to know it. It is probably true that most psychoanalysts are similarly absorbed in psychoanalysis rather than in the process by which we arrive at a knowledge of psychoanalysis. This preoccupation with the subject, to the over-shadowing of the study of the process by which it is learned, is excusable; for the subject is vast and there is much to learn. And yet one may permit oneself some surprise at this imbalance, for psychoanalysis itself may be seen as born of a doubt about the realities of the knowledge we have, and of the processes by which we obtain it. The central feature – the analysis the aspirant has to undergo – is imposed because it is supposed that without that experience the candidate's inadequacies relate to and prejudice the mental processes by which he acquires knowledge of his patient. Furthermore, psychoanalysis is itself a technique for the investigation of the human mind,

and it can be said to have discovered – i