[Undated]

The statement or belief that something is probable is related to prediction. Psychoanalytic hypotheses mostly belong to the class, which includes the hypotheses of any scientific deductive system relating to quantum mechanics. Any statement made by an analyst as a statement of fact about an event in analysis should be regarded as a statistical hypothesis, for it must be more obviously an approximation to the truth than is the case with most other disciplines. The essential point would seem to be to establish the nature of the lowest-level hypotheses in a psychoanalytic deductive system. Freud has described the value of a state he calls benevolent neutrality, a kind of free-floating attention. Poincaré would appear to desiderate an absorption in logical mental processes that, if not in themselves mathematical, at least issue ultimately in mathematical formulation.