ABSTRACT
Physical disorders can of course develop and expand, once a physical diagnosis is satisfactorily achieved, it is likely to be accepted as the basic ongoing determinant of the patient's pains, incapacities, and sufferings; whereas the whole basic psychological picture is likely to change, gradually but considerably, during psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts, in seeking the deeply unconscious interwoven nexus of urges and counter urges, anxieties, split feelings, phantasies, conflicts, and compromises between them that are at the base of any thought, feeling, or action, know very well that in the "truths" they seek, there is no one incontrovertible account. The same sort of "unreliability" may surely sometimes attend reports of non-psychoanalytic colleagues, but they might have less opportunity of noticing this. Their patients' inner physical organisation will probably not be changing in the way a person's psychological organisation can do during psychoanalysis.
