ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is a 'mystical experience', where it differs from other forms of mysticism is not in its scientific standing, but in its use of mystical means to attain knowledge of the natural rather than the spiritual world. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis there have been acrimonious debates about its evidential standing. Psychoanalysis does indeed consist of the penetration of a Special Realm, discontinuous from the ordinary world though dominating it, and accessible only to forms of exploration distinct. The problem here, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is almost exactly the opposite of that which would be the concern of empirical psychology. Because Stern relies on observation of behaviour without mediating it through the observer's own subjectivity, he cannot produce an account of the infant's emerging selfhood from the point of view of its psycho-dynamic determinants.
