You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a difficult problem to be able to state with any clarity what we mean by “understanding” in this science of psycho-analysis, but surely it has a dialectic. I am frequently reminded of the marvelous flight of imagination by Newton that produced the infinitesimal calculus, for it seems to catch in a condensed way the mental processes of differentiation and integration, the slope and the area, the one and the two dimensional which taken together generate the three-dimensional. The analogous mental process, taken away from the abstractions of mathematics or its concrete applications to the inanimate world, must use the far less precise instruments of symbols and their transformation into words. I wish here to make a differentiation that seems to grow out of the imagination about the interior world of the internal mother, the claustrum, and a certain class of phenomena which seem to deserve the names instability and rigidity. But I am aware that these same denominations apply as well to situations in which the claustrum seems to play no part. How can we differentiate and how describe the distinction?
Let us admit at the outset that any such exercise is purely in the interest of tidiness of thought and has little if anything to do with the actual events of the consulting room where two highly unique mentalities are met in love and battle. But they are also met in interest, both in themselves and in one another, and certainly there are moments in which the intensity of this interest holds together the love-making and the battling to initiate a truly passionate conjunction. It may not, does not last very long each time but its growth-promoting quality, for both, is unmistakeable. Probably most often it breaks up because the analyst errs; he misconstrues, oversteps the limits of privacy, enacts rather than communicating. But at other times the tension is too much for the patient and he retreats; the end of the session has loomed, the tension of uncertainty is unbe