ABSTRACT

This chapter is an inquiry into the nature of clinical facts in psychoanalysis. The attainment of the representability of psychic reality being a requisite for insight, the author examines inductive processes on the part of both analyst and analysand, which are to be considered proper aspects of the study of clinical facts. It is argued that the analyst chooses his interpretations guided in good measure by non-verbal material that is based on how he intuits that he is "used" by the analysand and the ways the analysand feels "used" by him; such non-verbal clues to the nature of the unconscious relational "frames" operating in sessions guide him to select relevant associations from the universe of the analysand's verbal utterances. He thus comes to voice his interpretations, purveying a "mapping" of psychic reality that typically makes use of a new viewpoint for description. Insight is 16achieved when the analysand attains ostensive refutation or redefinition of his unconscious "theories" about the relationship, and this happens only in concrete individual situations, when the effects of his relational unconscious "theories" come to be contrasted observationally in diverse "screens", perceptual and mnemic, against the background of the analyst's neutrality: in such a way unconscious "theories" attain the Pcs.-Cs. domain of the "no".