PREFACE

ion, however, is one of the cognitive operations involved in construction (see, e.g., Kelly 1955). Amheim (1969) defines abstraction as the drawing of essentials from organized wholes in which certain features are more crucial than others. Spinoza emphasized similarly that to express the innermost essence of something, one must avoid taking individual properties for the thing itself. In clinical interpretation we attempt to abstract the central dynamic theme of a session’s data in the form of a construction. Arnheim cites the following illustration of abstraction by a writer who asked what the following had in common: “The Manhattan skyline, the gridiron town plan, the skyscraper, the model-T Ford, the constitution, Mark Twain’s writing, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, comic strips, soap operas, assembly-line production, and chewing gum” (p. 172). A first abstraction suggests that all of the items are concerned with “what is American about America.” A further abstraction, however, elicits a more subtle and essential trait that is common to all eleven items, namely, “a concern with process rather than product.” According to Amheim, abstraction often involves “the ability to wrest a hidden feature from an adverse context” (p. 70). One of the inherent problems of human data processing and construction is the limited and unreliable human capacity for searching our vast memory stores. The ability to form symbolic relations, however, which defines one thing in terms of another, is highly developed in human beings. The capacity for symbolizing conserves resources and memory storage by grouping comparable experiences/memories together, and interpreting new experiences according to representations of already www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 170