Quote by Sigmund Freud

Published february 28, 2012 12:13

As long as we follow the development of the case backwards, starting from the final result, the chain of events appears to us to be continuous and we think that we've reached a very satisfying vision of things and maybe even complete. But if we go the opposite way, if we start from the preamble which we traced through analisys, and we try to follow it to the result, the impression of a necessary concatenation of events and not otherwise determinable is completely non-existant. We find out immediately that the result could've been different and we could've understood it and explained it equally well. Synthesis isn't then as satisfying as analysis; in other words, the knowledge of the preambles wouldn't permit us to foresee the nature of the result.