[Subsequent psychological effects]

Abstract

In connection with the concept of temporality and psychic causality, the notion of deferred action plays a significant role in Freud's thinking. Early experiences, impressions and recollections are later revised in the light of new experience and thus subsequently given a meaning that they did not originally have. The author's main concern here is to show that psychoanalysis of such a strictly hermeneutic nature--regarding the past entirely in terms of the present and projecting a whole system of new meanings onto it which the patient finds immediately convincing--is unable to satisfy the rigorous scientific standards implicit in Freud's approach to causal explanation and will thus necessarily fail to identify the actual past causes of present illness. Kerz-Rühling's article is a call for a more empirically oriented form of psychoanalysis de-potentiating empathy and understanding in counter-transference and reinstating the inductive method of establishing causes.