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In a previous paper (Plaut, 1970) I asked the question and used it as the title: ‘What do you actually do?’ The earlier paper had a sub-title, ‘Problems in communicating about analytical techniques’. I stressed the importance of the analyst's memory, selectivity and distortions for the purpose of making his point. This paper had in turn been the continuation of a previous (unpublished) one ‘On note-taking’. There I was concerned with memory and selectivity—selection being as William James had said ‘the very keel on which our mental ship is built’.
Similarly Poincaræ in Science and method (1952) pointed out that scientists have to make a selection, determine a hierarchy of facts, and this selection determines their method: they have a preference for simple rather than vast facts. Simple facts have an intellectual beauty and contribute to a harmony. Harmony—that temporary arrest of entropy and tendency to chaos which, as Norbert Wiener (1950) set out in The human use of human beings, is probably our fate.
How far we analytical psychologists are from that beautiful economy of thought and effort after which physical science and experimental psychology strive is clear to us all. The complexity of the human situation, the imperfections of ourselves as instruments of our theories, are painfully obvious. But we can do something about it: we can get to know the built-in bias and prejudice of the instrument.
When I now call this paper ‘What do we actually do?’, I want to draw attention to simple (in the sense of fundamental and even naive) questions which we have to ask ourselves from time to time in order not to lose our perspective. The replacement of the you by we in the present title is meant to serve three purposes.
First, I mean to indicate that I am regarding us as a small and friendly group of colleagues. We have a feeling of solidarity. We ask the question of ourselves and not in order to answer our critics. We want to be critical of ourselves. Secondly, the ‘we’ refers