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When there is no clear and definite conception of what should be considered a science, the tendency is to apply the criterion of quantitative exactitude to grant or deny scientific status to a certain knowledge. Mathematical knowledge is no more rigorous than historic-philologic knowledge. It has exactitude which is not equivalent to rigor. What is important is that the process of explicating the object we study be rational, systematic, objective, and methodic—the characteristics of any science. To increase our vision we have invented lenses; the analytic process has increased our ego potency by removing old inhibitions that impeded our insight. In psychology the observer and the observed belong to the same ontologic order: the psychical can only be analyzed with the psyche. The substantial difference between the psychoanalytic research position (therapeutic situation) and the research position of other sciences lies in the quality of the subject who records the experience. In other sciences the subject is protected by instruments devised to reach more deeply into the phenomena observed, while in psychoanalysis the subject is also the instrument which partakes of the experiment. This permits better recording and subsequent elaboration of the material resulting from the experiment.