ABSTRACT
Adequate theoretical discourse is discourse that can be placed into clear correspondence with external data; it should provide an orderly, rigorous, operationalizable, verifiable logical picture of the “external facts”. Although the bulk of psychoanalytic theorizing about discourse pertains to external issues, there are some indications that theorists have a vision of theoretical discourse whose internal characteristics are those of a traditionally conceived formal notational system. Technical/scientific psychoanalytic discourse is to be differentiated stringently from “ordinary” discourse, “the utterly unsystematic discourse of everyday life”. J. C. Graves describes nonlinearity in relativity theory: The field equations are nonlinear, a situation unprecedented in either classical or quantum physics. J. Jaynes compares the overall formal characteristics of the natural sciences with those of the psychological sciences. The chapter considers the linguistic situation in terms of several major themes—issues pertaining to logical analysis, the mechanization of the person, ontology, reflexivity, and explanation and transparency.
