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The experience of understanding, in the highest sense of the word, another human being or a human expression, for instance a work of art, always presupposes that we also have been deeply emotionally moved by this contact. As our emotional life functions according to original and fundamental conceptual forms, it recognizes and acknowledges only separate and individual phenomena but does not see abstract common and general overall perspectives. This means that when faced with the task of trying to understand another human being or his work, we can orient ourselves in a scientific way in accordance with general laws and tendencies only in relation to the most general issues in the field in question. Most of the time we have to recourse to the individual and temporarily unique starting points which, due to the variety of personal nuances, gives the working method the character of handicraft or artistic performance rather than that of scientific work in the traditional sense.
In a basic essay on the methods of psychoanalysis, “Zur Einleitung der Behandlung” (1913), Freud compares psychoanalysis with a game of chess and points out that in both these activities, one can only give general advice about certain opening and concluding goals and features; what takes place in between these relatively short events is too multifarious to fit in within the framework of some general directives.
Since the writing of the essay, psychoanalysis has developed in a way which hardly challenges the validity of Freud's parallel, rather the contrary. The length of the individual analysis has multiplied, the interest in