ABSTRACT
Because psychoanalytic theories are a compound of observed material and abstraction from it, they have been criticized as unscientific. This chapter proposes to seek a mode of abstraction that ensures that the theoretical statement retains the minimum of particularization. The loss of comprehensibility that this entails can be made up for by the use of models to supplement the theoretical systems. The defect of the existing psychoanalytic theory is not unlike that of the ideogram as compared with a word formed alphabetically; the ideogram represents one word only but relatively few letters are required for the formation of many thousands of words. The chapter represents an element that may be called, though with a loss of accuracy, the essential feature of Melanie Klein’s conception of projective identification.
