Evaluation of Data
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All these years, in which psychoanalysis has taught its tenets to each generation of doctors, the authoritarian method was used, as can be verified by reading a few of the books on the subject. Within them is found, interminably, �Freud said . . . .� The truly important thing is not that �Freud said� a thing, but �Is the data valuable? If it is valuable, how valuable is it?� You might say that a datum is as valuable as it has been evaluated. A datum can be proved in ratio to whether it can be evaluated by other data, and its magnitude is established by how many other data it clarifies. Thus, the biggest datum possible would be one which would clarify and identify all knowledge known to man in the material universe.
Unfortunately, however, there is no such thing as a Prime Datum. There must be, not one datum, but two data, since a datum is of no use unless it can be evaluated. Furthermore, there must be a datum of similar magnitude with which to evaluate any given datum.
Data is your data only so long as you have evaluated it. It is your data by authority or it is your data. If it is your data by authority somebody has forced it upon you, and at best it is little more than a
light aberration. Of course, if you asked a question of a man whom you thought knew his business and he gave you his answer, that datum was not forced upon you. But if you went away from him believing from then on that such a datum existed without taking the trouble to investigate the answer for yourself—without comparing it to the known uiverse—you were falling short of completing the cycle of learning.