[Undated]: An Interpretation. Cogitations

An interpretation should not be given on a single association; a single association is open to an enormous number of interpretations. But two associations, like two points that determine a line, determine an interpretation. Not quite. What do they determine? A direction; a trend of thought perhaps. And does this mean that it is at a point of this kind that one might find the intersection or meet a logical product of the psychoanalytic interpretation with the s.d.s. known as Euclidean geometry? Is the statement that two points determine a line really an abstraction from an empirically experienced fact that two ideas, taken together, determine a trend in the speaker's mind? If so, then it is possible that the s.d.s. that is Euclidean geometry is of great importance in the science of psychoanalysis (Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation, p. 27) and can be used to establish calculi, e.g. algebraic calculi, to ‘fix’ certain psychoanalytic theories and expose fallacies in others, as was the case in mathematics when nineteenth-century mathematicians tried to represent the mathematical ‘proofs’ of certain eighteenth-century mathematicians in an adequate calculus.

I have noticed that something that seems clear when I write it appears to have lost all meaning when I come back to it freshly on a subsequent occasion. The words are all there and are as likely as not clear enough, but I find that I no longer know what they are about. It is like the disappearance, apparently, of all knowledge or understanding of Greek literature in Byzantium, or of astronomical or other ideas that are clearly grasped by one generation but then seem to be completely lost by subsequent generations, e.g. the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus. Is it possible that one of the great functions of abstraction is to ‘fix’ an element, the element, of empirical experience, which without abstraction is lost? Is there something permanent and indestructibly precise about the formula of a scientific deductive syste