ABSTRACT
The range of accurate predictions is limited, to social or psychological situations based on a comparable number of persons, or a comparable degree of complexity in the structure of the psycho-dynamic unit under consideration to that on which the basic research was done. Two features of psycho-analytic work are outstanding in importance for the human sciences. The first is its a-historical character: this gives it its power to resolve the complicated phenomena displayed into its component elements; and the second is the fact that the problems of the subject under investigation have priority over the intellectual curiosity of the observer. The matter of prediction is an important one for any science, even for the 'pattern sciences' where it is less used than in the 'measuring sciences' such as physics. In the language of two- and three-person psychology the ego ideal of the observer in one-person psychology is a robot.
