The Framework for a Model of Psychoanalytic Inference

Abstract

Although theoretical prepositions in the field of psychoanalysis ultimately rest on the empirical base of claims by individual psychoanalysts about their institutive understanding of the utterances of individual analysands, there is as yet no significant scientific theory that accounts either for the analyst's ability to understand or for how he does so. Our claim is that these institutions can be represented by a two-stage model whose first step consists of classificatory processes and whose second step is essentially that of inductive inferences. We shall present our case by discussing three levels of structure to be found in the discourse of a patient in psychoanalysis: the surface TEXT, the classification of this text in Linguistic MAPS and Personal Event FRAMES derived from the maps.