ABSTRACT
One of the most important words in the vocabulary of clinicians is the word "pattern." We speak of ourselves as thinking in terms of totalities, organizations, configurations; and we congratulate ourselves for being able to look upon case material in this patterned, non-atomistic way. The question as to how much we really do this, and the further question of how well it pays off in terms of predictive efficiency, is a very complicated one on which neither theoretical nor adequate empirical data as yet exist.
