In a series of six lectures given in 1944 and published under the title “The Scientific Methodology of Psychoanalysis,” David Rapaport presented a methodological analysis of the psychoanalytic approach to human experience. His concern was to distinguish clearly the essential foundations of the psychoanalytic method from the various techniques used to apply the method, and from the levels of theory developed on the basis of data gained from the method. Citing in the essay the example of Kant's critical philosophy, Rapaport seemed to conceive of his undertaking as a methodological parallel to Kant's epistemological investigations of the necessary structure of human understanding; Rapaport wished to uncover what might be loosely called the synthetic a priori of the analytic method of knowing—the pattern of assumptions which govern the analytic approach to its object, which shape the particular way in which