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From the outset Freud saw psycho-analysis as the basis for a comprehensive psychology. Scientific analysis is not limited to the use of the analytic method but to an expanding field of application by which it is in turn enriched. Still its theoretical complexities, dictated by the special features of its subject matter, cannot yet easily be resolved by translation into the language of related fields (such as brain physiology), alluring as the greater concreteness of such languages may be.
Within its own methodological field, the interrelatedness of hypothesis and clinical fact-finding is seldom simple, and communication is frequently inexplicit, even misleading, in defining this interrelatedness. But as not even the simplest statement on unconscious processes can be made without permeation by hypothesis, and the full meaning of clinical findings can only be developed in the framework of theory, the difficulty of separating fact and hypothesis is not an accidental one. Further, it would be quite wrong to expect a simple correlation between the ratio of observational and hypothetical elements, and the scientific value of attempted formulation. A great number of data, by far transcending the immediate givens, and a considerable amount of hypothetical thinking have to be introduced in order to come to a conclusion.
The reconstruction of early childhood experiences in preverbal stages of development challenges our powers of formulation because the structure of the mental apparatus and the laws governing it may defy extrapolation from the more familiar later stages, and because experimental checks are not available. It is therefore imperative to study these by every method at our disposal, including that from observational data.
Yet concepts of mental processes are more than one step removed from behavioural data and from immediate experience. This remoteness is one reason why intersubjective testing of analytic propositions is arduous. Elements of behaviour similar