It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great 
discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the 
suspended judgment. A. N. Whitehead, on the other hand, 
explained how the great discovery of the nineteenth century 
was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the 
technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and 
working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point 
at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired 
object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then 
inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just 
that effect and no other.

     But the “technique of the suspended judgment” goes 
further. It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood 
on an adult, and offsets the effect before it happens. In 
psychiatry, it is the technique of total permissiveness extended