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At the high point of his career, Freud was moved to observe: 'We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify, and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone… They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions—although everything depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant relations to the empirical material, relations that we seem to sense before we can clearly recognize and demonstrate them' (12).
Freud here states a problem that remains today a central concern of psychoanalysts. Failure to resolve it has given rise to a number of dichotomous views of the nature and intelligibility of psychoanalytic theory. At one polarity, there is a tendency to emphasize the descriptive aspect of psychoanalytic concepts and their inherent indefiniteness. At the opposite pole many theorists try hard to apply the canons of rigorous scientific thinking to analytic theory. The critical issue which dominates the debate is that of meaning. The difficulties encountered by the