My Intuitometer: Experience and Inference

I have invented a word, intuitometer, to characterize a seminal aspect of my psychoanalytic work. In it are combined the detection of a psychosomatic correlate of the phenomenon of intuition and discernment of its qualities, with their measurement. I present data concerning this approach as an avenue to the experiential relationship of the psychic and somatic, individual and group, in space and time, in a manner that conceivably could be rendered mathematical, and subject to inference of higher psychologic order.

This presentation is grounded in psychoanalytic experience of close to six decades. The story begins with a surprise. It occurred at the start of my career as a psychiatrist, before my formal training in psychoanalysis, in the context of group treatment at a prison. The subjects were characteristically raucous young psychopaths. Under what we considered to be analytically oriented guidance by myself and my associates, they would regularly enter a state of quiet contemplation, indeed communion, followed by “normal” constructive, prosocial behavior. We conjectured on what was going on, why alienation had given way to reconciliation, why the antisocial leadership was replaced by the prosocial and a readiness to talk about themselves, to pose and solve their problems in living. I contributed the observation that I had noticed something subjective just prior to the period of communion, a sense of poignant expectancy in my chest, centering behind my sternum.

We recognized that something momentous was going on. These psychopathically inclined persons had systematically left a world of alienation to rejoin consensual reality. In my teaching I termed this process “from gripe to group.” My cotherapists also experienced the subjective substernal sensation. I did not