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“Though the structure of psychoanalysis is unfinished, it nevertheless presents, even to-day, a unity from which elements cannot be broken off at the caprice of whoever comes along”
The question of Scientific Truth, of what it is and the ways in which it can be established, is present in various forms throughout Freud's work. During the “ambientalist” period of Freud's thought (Rapaport 1967), which is practically the same period in which the theory of seduction was formulated and advanced, Freud's acceptance of the correspondist theory of truth (the theory of Aristotle-Augustine-Tarski) is implicit, not to say obvious. Neurosis is seen as the consequence of a fact (seduction) occurring during childhood, which the analyst must reconstruct by following the ramifications of the patient's associations. The reconstruction is regarded as true if it tallies with the fact, otherwise it is false. If it is true, this can be confirmed indirectly by the disappearance of the symptoms, or in some more fortunate cases, direct confirmation can be provided by an independent witness's account of the event. The complex history of the