아래의 텍스트는 luhmann이 쓴 learning how to read인데, 그의 지침에 따른다면 만약에 프로이트의 성격이론을 배우고 있을 때 어떻게 적용될 수 있을까? "Translators not sufficiently acquainted with a given text’s theoretical context often employ equal effort with regard to all the words they find within a text. This does not mean that they will translate “word for word” and follow the word order because this is usually impossible. But they do not consider themselves justified in playing with the large mass of not especially significant words. They select among the many lexically similar equivalents which seem to approach the intended meaning most closely. And I do not know how this could be done differently without writing entirely different texts in the other language. Theoretically interested readers should therefore follow the advice of learning as many languages as possible in such a way that they have at least passive mastery of them and thus can read and understand them.

Beginners, especially beginning students, find that they are first confronted with a mass of words, which are ordered in sentence-form, which they read sentence by sentence, and which they can understand as sentences. But what is important? What must be “learned?” What is important, what is mere adornment? After a few pages of reading, one can hardly remember what one has read. Which recommendations can be offered?

One possibility is to remember names: Marx, Freud, Giddens, Bourdieu, etc. Obviously most knowledge can also be ordered by names, eventually also by names of theories such as social phenomenology, theory of reception in the literary disciplines, etc. Even introductions to sociology and basic texts are conceived in this way. What one cannot learn from such works, however, are conceptual connections and especially the nature of the problems that these texts try to solve. Still, even candidates in exams at the end of their studies want to be examined on Max Weber or, if that is too much, on Humberto Maturana, and they are prepared to report on what they know about these authors.

The problem of reading theoretical texts seems to consist in the fact that they do not require just short-term memory but also long-term memory in order to be able to distinguish between what is essential and what is not essential and what is new from what is merely repeated. But one cannot remember everything. This would simply be learning by heart. In other words, one must read very selectively and must be able to extract extensively networked references. One must be able to understand recursions. But how can one learn these skills, if no instructions can be given; or perhaps only about things that are unusual like “recursion” in the previous sentences as opposed to “must”?

Perhaps the best method would be to take notes—not excerpts, but condensed reformulations of what has been read. The re-description of what has already been described leads almost automatically to a training of paying attention to “frames,” or schemata of observation, or even to noticing conditions which lead the text to offer some descriptions but not others. What is not meant, what is excluded when something is asserted? If the text speaks of “human rights,” what is excluded by the author? Non-human rights? Human duties? Or is it comparing cultures or historical times that did not know human rights and could live very well without them?

This leads to another question: what are we to do with what we have written down? Certainly, at first we will produce mostly garbage. But we have been educated to expect something useful from our activities and soon lose confidence if nothing useful seems to result. We should therefore reflect on whether and how we arrange our notes so that they are available for later access. At least this should be a consoling illusion. This requires a computer or a card file with numbered index cards and an index. The constant accommodation of notes is then a further step in our working process. It costs time, but it is also an activity that goes beyond the mere monotony of reading and incidentally trains our memory.“