Professor Fonagy's article (Psychiatric Bulletin, October 2004, 28, 357-359) is concerned mainly with the ‘elucidation of pathogenic mechanisms’, so that the ‘structured manualised psychotherapy techniques of the future will be designed to specifically address empirically established developmental dysfunctions’. And for the purpose ‘Non-biased non subjective measures of outcome are urgently required’. To achieve this, he invokes ‘scanning techniques that allow the simultaneous imaging of two individuals interacting’ (i.e. in the form of electronic signals).

Having in this way identified a ‘biological deficit’ (i.e. in the function of the subject's brain) ‘psychotherapy can be available to provide a set of techniques that the mind can use to overcome a biological deficit’.

Freud recognised that human language could not be construed as a product of ‘ natural laws’ governing the behaviour simply of ‘material particles and forces’. Rather, every utterance in a language involves some process of interpretation by each auditor, and may be as much the expression of an unconscious intention of the speaker to deceive or mislead a listener (and perhaps even the speaker himself too) as simply to inform the other. To make these problems even more difficult in this field, untruths and errors may themselves point silently - as we all know - to unacceptable or disturbing truths and intentions to which consciousness is therefore barred.

Even the possibility of electronic systems or devices which might enable the display of evidence of such conflicts (especially in a symbolic or coded form) could surely not be called a therapy, or even humanitarian. The pursuit of understanding the origins and meanings of human mental conflict and suffering must indeed be humanitarian, perhaps one might even say humble?