[Undated]

The central feature – the analysis the aspirant has to undergo – is imposed because it is supposed that without that experience the candidate’s inadequacies relate to and prejudice the mental processes by which he acquires knowledge of his patient. The lack of means for establishing reality of earth’s movement round the sun as a factual counterpart of the heliocentric theory meant that there was freedom to entertain views that appeared to be supported by observations available to the ordinary individual, and at the same time enabled those observations to correspond with certain classes of internal phantasy. The state of affairs is common to all cosmologies and not simply to those existing during the dominance of a particular school of thought. Lower-level hypotheses are of decreasing generalization until the lowest level of all, which have a degree of particularization that makes them suitable for verification by empirical experience such as scientific experiments, or, in the case of psychoanalysis, clinical experience.