We come back to the hypothesis that members of the psychoanalytic community read their literature much as they listen to their patients. We have seen in Chapter IV how the analyst is continuously filling in gaps and supplying meanings as he listens to the stream of associations from the patient and how, indeed, he must take an active stance in order to make sense out of what he hears. In much the same way, readers of the psychoanalytic literature must go beyond the text and supply their own clinical examples for abstract theoretical terms, imagine linking associations that will connect two apparently disconnected anecdotes and, in general, find their own preferred ways of giving substance to the author's claims. The raw data are usually in short supply and to no one's apparent concern, as we have seen in our analysis of the concept of therapeutic alliance (Chapter VI) where fragmentary evidence was accepted as the norm by all but a small minority of readers. There is no reason to think that this case is in any way unusual.