Deduction and Induction in Psychoanalytic Thinking.

I was reading a book on the struggles of Einstein and free thinkers in his time in Europe with great details of the links he had with the physicists of his time. The book showed well the effect of his 'sudden unexpected genius' of the notion of relativity on the field of electromagnetism. Most of that part of the book was high above my mental capacity, but one trivial remark by the author Matthew Stanly about Einstein's way of thinking gripped more than my attention. He said that Einstein's intuition came from Inductive thinking and not from Deductive thinking. There is so much to say about the distinctiveness of each of these bipolarities, but the striking thing is that deductive thinking adds to a postulate what clarifies it while inductive thinking deduces from the postulate what explains it. 

This simple and clear distinction between the two poles of thinking shed a beam of light on psychoanalysis. Generally, we agree that the basic discovery of psychoanalysis came to Freud from interpreting dreams and discovering (uncovering)the primary and secondary processes. He inductively distinguished the difference between Instinct and Trieb, the duality of the subject in narcissism, even the Beyond the pleasure Principle, and most of his major and not so major discoveries came from inductive thinking.

I went back to the Standard Edition to remind myself of what was deductive and what was inductive in his work, and it was a totally new journey to psychoanalysis. This issue brought to my mind the points of disagreement I always had with analysis based on deductive work; especially with the birth of schools (even Lacanism). It also reminded me of some difficult supervisions of some candidates who insisted that discovering the unconscious is a deduction and they could not comprehend the notion that it should come from inducing it from the material. I must admit that I did not have that distinction clear in my mind as it is now after reading Stanly's book. 

I wish some young analysts would include the distinction between deductive analysis and inductive analysis and training faculties in the institutes give that distinction some serious attention