Prologue

There can be no doubt that all knowledge begins with experience … Though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience …

During the first five years of Psychoanalytic Inquiry's publication, a variety of topics have been explored ranging from Values and Neutrality and Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis to Psychoanalytic Models and new developments in Infant Research. In the papers devoted to each topic, we have been impressed that the issues discussed frequently are traced to attempts to reconcile the dialectic in psychoanalysis between science and humanism. Questions have been repeatedly asked concerning the proper balance between objectivism and subjectivism, meaning and causality, psychology and metapsychology, phenomenology and abstraction.

We believe further developments in psychoanalytic understanding are contingent on a clarification of the place of psychoanalysis within the realm of science. The claim of psychoanalysis for a place within science has been questioned because the methodology and data of psychoanalysis are based on human interaction and subjective experience. Psychoanalysis can answer that it encompasses both a scientifically based theory of mental functioning and the larger problems of human existence. What makes this so vital an area for exploration is that the issues on both sides of the dialectic between science and humanism are constantly changing, and these changes must be reflected in psychoanalysis. Freud's contribution evolved from the 19th and early 20th century's view of science, strongly influenced by positive objectivism with emphasis on the separation of objectivism and subjectivism. With the development