ABSTRACT
The invention of the microscope or the telescope or of means of measuring time to the fraction of a nanosecond or weighing quantities to millionths of a gram. Unlike Galileo's telescope and van Leeuwenhoek's microscope, the psychoscope is an intangible instrument as noted, it is a set of mental functions or operations. The extraction of meaning by means of a psychoscope is based on a conceptualization of how latent contents are created in the course of emotional adaptation. In the hands of classically trained psychoanalysts, the F-scope found less frequent use than intended by Freud, and, in general, the version of the scope that they used when they did so was the one designed to generate inferences from a patient's surface imagery. Two clinical vignettes will help us to concretize the similarities and differences between the F- and C-scopes, and enable us to have a clearer perspective on their relationship to a potential science for psychoanalysis.
