Letters to the Editors: On: Validation of Psychoanalytic Theories: Toward a Conceptualization of References

Dear Sirs,

Zachrisson and Zachrisson (2005) prompted the following comments.

Psychoanalytic conceptualization includes both the drive and the unconscious on the one hand and a hermeneutic orientation on the other. These two different conceptual worlds cannot simultaneously form causality or linear continuity.

Free association is the method of psychoanalysis, which analysts must foster in themselves and mould for use in their work. Personal analyses are essential for enabling free association and its continued functioning can only be ensured through constant self-analysis. This development of analytic thinking shapes both work by the couch and theoretical thinking. The analyst's mind is the instrument of analysis. It determines the content and timing of the whole of analytic activity, the choice of words and the tones of voice. I did not see any mention of this in Zachrisson and Zachrisson. Analysts have their own basic concepts, whose abandonment seems to be encouraged by these modern so-called scientific attempts to flee from the analyst's demanding self-discipline. There is no reason to assume that experts from other fields would be able to understand our thinking.

Psychoanalysis is an unusual skill and science in that it exists at the interface with the unconscious. Its fundamental concepts are: the unconscious, free association, the drives, the analyst's own free-associating mind, self-analysis and a very important quality: contact with the unconscious landscape of infantile sexu-ality in between the preconscious and unconscious spheres. This atlas of sexuality seems to have utterly vanished from analytic forms of know-how. In addition, central elements in analytic skills are dreams and their interpretative use in the analytic process. And the significance of transference and resistance must not by any means be forgotten. Here there is a whole group of co-ordinates not found in other sciences. True correspondence with other sciences does not exist. The simultaneity