A Discussion of the Paper by Ishak Ramzy and Howard Shevrin on 'The Nature of the Inference Process in Psychoanalytic Interpretation: A Critical Review of the Literature'

I fully agree with the importance given by Drs Ramzy and Shevrin (this issue) to the need for rigorously systematizing a psychoanalytical methodology in order to give psychoanalytic theory the scientific structure which, based upon clinical observation, will enable it to formulate laws applicable to the psychic system and eventually to offer predictions susceptible of proof.

I shall therefore make general comments on their paper while leaving aside certain concepts, and devote myself to furthering contributions to their serious and essential line of thought. For the same reason I shall attempt to give my own tentative reply to two aspects of the same essential question repeatedly asked by the authors: (1) On what basis or by what process the analyst selects the relevant general principle or frame of reference in the process of arriving at interpretations? (2) How to arrive systematically at the empirical test which facilitates the full development of psychoanalysis as a science of 'traces'.

Quoting Cheshire (1964) who states that Freud 'committed no grosser crime than to take determinism seriously', the authors assert that 'A strict determinism is the basis of science, any science, and is not the sole priority of the "advanced sciences".' Since I agree with that declaration, I shall begin by stating which are the elements that lead me to believe that psychoanalysis should be bound within limits in the same way as the other factual disciplines are, and then go on to give a brief outline of the scientific method which individuates it from them.

Psychoanalysis puts the canonical scientific method into effect (Klimovsky, 1971). It defines both its epistemological empirical basis, i.e. the values that everday practice offers to our understanding, and its methodological empirical basis, i.e. the presupposed theories used as a basis for its daily work. Those bases lead to the postulation of three types of scientific statement: (1) basic or primary level empirical affir