ABSTRACT
Beset as he is by the examples in history of the many occasions on which men of great ability and integrity have been unable to maintain a grasp of the truth about the phenomena that they wish to investigate, and made further aware of the pitfalls attending his search by the fact that his study is itself an investigation of a most serious source of errors in human judgement, the analyst’s problem is to find a method—if there is one—by which he can be aware that he is falling into error, and even (if possible) of what kind of error he has become the victim. The search for this method constitutes for the psycho-analyst the search for a scientific method. For him the scientific method is that procedure, or series of procedures, by which error is made to declare itself.
