The microstructure of free association

The author's purpose is threefold: first, to demonstrate the redundancy in the events of the complex life of a patient as told to a psychoanalyst; second, to show two novel ways to represent those events simply; and third, to suggest that the field of psychoanalysis, under assault from philosophers of science and hermeneuticists alike for either not being or for trying to be a science, can in principle be reclaimed for science. It can be done by abandoning a widely held belief that human behavior is simply too complex, too malleable, too rooted in ineffable experience to permit of systematic scientific capture.