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Psychoanalysis…never shuts the door on a new truth
This article attempts to spell out the steps to be taken and the areas in which to take them, by way of supplementing the modern analytic research principles set forth by Meadow (1981, 1984) in earlier issues of this journal. Freud (1987, p. 83) has described scientific creativity as “the succession of daringly playful fantasy and relentlessly realistic critisism”-in other words, an interplay of primary and secondary process. Under these conditions, rationality is intermittently suspended, ego boundaries are similarly rendered permeable, while the final esthetic derives from the merging of form and substance. In the psychoanalytic context, scientific creativity is fueled by curiosity about psychic process, and in the best of worlds the aim is to attain a state of illumination which goes by the name of meaning. In more mundance clinical circumstances, the artist strives to be something of a scientist, and the scientist something of an artist, the two joining hands to guide the healer toward his incremental therapeutic successes.
If we apply this line of thought to the actualities of clinical psychoanalysis, we find ourselves caught up in a web crosshatched of received wisdom and open-ended potentialities. And who is to say where the one ends and the other begins? We do, however, owe ourselves a debt of attentiveness to fact, fancy and affect, as they invest the mind's eye.