ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is concerned with the domain of ideas; included are thoughts and feelings of all kinds. In the physical sciences the human being is dealing with a physical material: psychoanalysts are concerned with characters, personalities, thoughts, ideas and feelings. 'There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth allows us to believe.' There are difficulties analogous to those associated with the caesura of birth. A caesura seems to exist between the inhabitants, say, of the East and of the West. The ability of the analysand to take advantage of the possibility of success which has opened out is a symptom of the penetration from the situation which Freud describes as intra-uterine, to the situation which is conscious and post-caesural. The chapter considers a non-analytic situation, namely that in which the patient has to deal with changes in his affairs by making decisions.
