Inductive Thinking in Psychoanalysis.

There is no obvious reason for psychoanalysts to reject or at least to dismiss non-clinical thought as irrelevant to psychoanalytic clinical work. Most, if not almost all my posts, that do ne relate directly to clinical practice or the application of psychoanalysis are frowned at. This is a prescription for unmanageable deterioration of our specialty. The reason is that Psychoanalysis itself was and still is not clinical discipline. It was originally a discovery that needed a theory to take its place epistemology. By mistake the theory needed did not come from thinkers but from practitioners. Yet, Freud and a few of his followers had the insight that Psychoanalysis is more than just a psychotherapy and tried their hands in trying to give it a theoretical foundation. The continued domination of the clinical picture of psychoanalysis delayed and distorted the efforts to give it its ‘theoretical’ structure.  Just to avoid a common misunderstanding: a theory of psychoanalysis does not interfere with whatever the clinician thinks of his work.

Psychoanalysis, like all other similar mental accomplishments, is either the product of inductive or deductive process of thinking. We can say- with reasonable agreement- that psychoanalysis was initiated by noticing two things. The first is the coexistence of two streams of thought of which one is not fully in the sphere of awareness or consciousness (Anna O). The second is the interpretation of dreams (the Irma dream). In both those initiating events Freud induced from what he observed the existence of a split in the familiar process of consciousness, and a dream is a scene that says something about the dreamer, which neither the patient nor the analyst could deduce from manifest dream but could educe a latent meaning from the patient’s associations about the dream. The Irma dream said many things about the day residues, but the interested dream said (unconsciously) a great deal about the dreamer-Sigmund Freud his anxieties, his thoughts about his colleagues, his sense of importance and being hungry for more: his Narcissism.

The difference between deductive thinking and inductive thing is the difference between psychoanalysis without a theory and with a theory, even psychoanalysis and the mere psychotherapeutic work. I will mention a case I used a couple of years ago in one of my previous postings on my personal blog.

The patient was the older of two sisters. She looked more like her father while the younger and prettier sister took after their very pretty mother. The analysis was going nowhere - for a lengthy period of time- as the patient was just reporting on the divided family structure and her mother’s bad treatment of her. I could say that I was also compliant to that type of resistance and was bust deducing some feature of masochistic pleasure in the patient’s complaining. In a moment of ‘inductive’ thinking I realized some sadistic sense of joy that her sister is deprived of the father’s love and attention. This was a deduction from the material but an inductive thought that was in the fabric of the family structure.

There was a pleasure in releasing myself from my deductive work and moving to the inductive analysis of my patient’s psychological stagnation in complaining. Again: deduction is finding the thread to trace to the main issue- induction is to discover what is missing to make sense of what is obvious, operational, but seems to be void of justification. This point is more important than just doing better psychoanalysis. The therapeutic objective of psychoanalytic therapy is to change the intrapsychic structure of the patient Not to improve his interpersonal way of relating to others. We cannot do that without inducing from the obvious what is missing in it. In this patient it was inducing her narcissistic relationship with the father and depriving her sister from that closeness to the father. I believe-as I found out- that changing that intrapsychic structure was therapeutic enough.    

Thus, true analytic work comes from the analyst’s ability to induce a meaning in his hourly deductive work. Just keep in mind the difference between interpretation and reconstruction.