Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East

DISCUSSION: Dr. Paul Schwaber emphasized the degree to which talking, lecturing, and writing were crucial to Freud's way of doing science and his method of discovery in psychoanalysis. He expressed agreement with Dr. Mahony's description of Freud's fluency, trust, and pleasure in his writing, manifested by his sense of process, open-endedness, affinity for the oral mode of communication, address to an interlocutor, consideration for the reader's ability to understand, respect for his own spontaneity, doubts, and eruptions of irrationality, and ability to call on his humor, convictions, knowledge, and learning. Dr. Schwaber then compared Dr. Mahony's demystification of Freud's writing to Freud's method of analysis. Freud's prose allows internal responses of identification and transference as well as of cognition. To consider Freud's writing from this perspective is to approach it as art. However, the dependable persona of Freud's active authorial presence in his prose, observing, thinking, doubting, and anticipating objections, offers a perspectival or relational truth. This truth is relatable both to modernist techniques in fiction and poetry, and to relational, probabilistic, and uncertain canons of modern scientific truth. Freud wrote to Marie Bonaparte, "Mediocre spirits demand of science a kind of certainty which it cannot give, a sort of religious satisfaction. Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge. Mental events seem to be immeasurable and probably will always be so." This is both a scientific and literary attitude. It is true in our clinical experience, but is it true of our writing? Freud's art outdistanced his Helmholtzian assumptions of science, but not scientific development. Freud's art is crucial to his science. Freud as an essayist of genius has become a burden to us in his overbearing originality, comparable to God in contemporary theology. Not only this theory and technique