Reflecting the influence of scientific positivism on our discipline, psychoanalysts have always preferred to live in a modular age in which knowledge comes in discrete and self-contained packages. This proclivity notwithstanding, analysts have long accepted as an obiter dictum of their discipline the fact that metaphysical certainty has never existed. This realization has proven disconcerting to those of us who believe that certain rules of correspondence can be made rigorously applicable to our explanations of psychological experience. In particular, we continue to be uncomfortable with the recognition that the nexus of the psychoanalytic process, the observer-observed transaction, constitutes a logical unity that yields a mutable, flexible, and approximate “alloy” of analyst and analysand. But logical evaluation of psychoanalytic propositions remains important, and such evaluation can proceed only if we are willing