ABSTRACT
Most people think of psycho-analysis, as a method of treatment for a complaint. But as psycho-analysis has grown so it has been seen to differ from physical medicine. For most purposes the similarity yields illuminating comparisons and models that facilitate discussion. Differentiation has meant that models which were illuminating have become opaque and often misleading even to psychoanalysts. The patient should be shown the evidence on which the interpretation is based; if the evidence is scattered sparsely over a period of years of acting-out, the problem of interpretation assumes serious proportions, because the medium in which the patient is effecting his transformation is not predominantly conversational English, but acting-out. The analysis may be regarded as one moment in time stretched out so that it becomes a line or surface spread out over a period of years – an extremely thin membrane of a moment.
