In a message dated 97-04-06 08:51:59 EDT, David wrote:

>  I just mean to convey my opinion
>  that when we think of causality with an individual patient, it's important

> to stick very closely with the patient's internal, subjective
>  frame-of-reference--rather than engaging in speculation about how certain
>  external events or people affected the patient;  empirically speaking, we
>  have no access to these events or people.

We tend to think of "science" as interested in prediction and control (if the
first, then the second). It might be useful to consider the notion of
"forecast" (as used in meteorology and other nonlinear, dynamic systems)
rather than prediction. That is, the analytic focus on the patient's psychic
world is the investigation of a system that is nonlinear and sensitive to
prior input (experience), as well as symbolically encoded. Reboid (as in
Freud's suggestion that dream images are like the elements of a rebus, and
Lacan's addition that they, and the Ucs,  are structured like a language), to
coin a term.

While the therapist has no access to the actual "events or people," access to
a patient's fantasies, memories, and psychic structure expresses more than is
implied by a strict interpretation of the rule of psychic reality.

What does "expresses" mean in that sentence? How does the therapist know? We
turn our "receptive unconscious" towards the patient's. Yet not everyone will
receive the same broadcast. The patient tells us a story, speaks in riddles,
expresses a rebus. We are awash in data. Reality is overdetermined.

Bob Berley
Seattle