For Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic interpretation was the only method that could yield to the patient correct insight into the unconscious conflicts underlying his neurosis. Symptoms were symbols that were diagnosed by the analyst’s interpretations for the purpose of offering the patient conscious insight into the aetiology of his neurotic symptoms, and this “diagnosis” accompanied by insight was assumed to be causally necessary for the therapeutic conquest of the neurosis (Lomas, 1987; Strenger, 1991). In Freud’s day, it was commonly believed that therapy was not deserving of the designation “psychoanalysis” if any intervention other than interpretation was to be found at the centrepiece of the interaction between the analyst and the patient.
Psychoanalytic interpretation first appeared as a concept in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900), when he defined interpreting a dream as assigning a meaning to it, which fits into the chain of mental acts as a link. He realized that dreams mean something and make sense in the light of the dreamer’s unconscious motives (Edelson, 1975). Interpreting a dream was a decoding method that treated dreams as a cryptography in which each sign could be translated into another sign having a known meaning.
Interpretation is not only used to understand dreams, but can be applied to any of the patient’s thoughts, feelings, behaviours, parapraxes (such as slips of the tongue), dreams, symptoms, resistances to treatment, and the transference relationship between analyst and analysand. When the analyst interprets he intends to bring out the latent meaning of what the patient says and does in order to allow the patient to reach deep understanding that underlies manifest, superficial meaning.
Psychoanalysis was built on the power of the word. It is traditionally considered a verbal therapy in which the words of the patient inform the analyst, who pieces together networks of understanding which are conveyed, through words, back to the patient (Novick, 1990). Through the communication and alteration of meaning contained in the analyst’s interpretation, psychoanalysis induces healing change.
The goal of interpretation is to make the unintelligible intelligible. The analyst interprets the meaningless by imagining the context in which it would be meaningful, and offers this meaning over and above the meaning given to it by the patient (Lomas, 1987).The aim of interpretation is not to criticize or invalidate the patient’s experience, but to shed light on that which was unnoticed or ignored and to cut away the self-deceit that is used to protect the patient from the truth of experience. All patients “ . . . transform painful reality into a more palatable cover story and, through repression, we seek comfort in not knowing. In the act of interpreting, the psychoanalyst brings back these truths” (Paulino Jr. & Nichols, 1986, p. 13).
Interpretation is a creative act that requires the analyst’s imagination. It calls for a playful, experimental attitude that generates the freedom of thought necessary to interpret the unconscious mind and its derivatives. The analyst listens knowing an utterance is intrinsically ambiguous, and part of his work is to disambiguate the utterance by assigning meaning to it where none was apparent (Edelson, 1975). As the relationship that develops between the analyst and analysand is the only interaction that both parties have access to and participate in directly, it is an immediate and reliable source of information and provides many opportunities for interpretation, in particular the ways the patient may be transferring onto the relationship with the analyst conflicts, affects, and interpersonal patterns from the patient’s past. Interpretations of this process are called transference interpretations.
All interpretations are constructed to contribute meaning to a patient’s symptoms, converting the senseless into that which makes sense for the analyst and the analysand. It is assumed that all patients suffer from a lack of understanding of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and the analyst’s interpretations function primarily to provide a conceptual bridge across this gap in the patient’s understanding. Material produced in sessions, such as dreams, can often have more than one meaning that varies over time, and some analysts believe the “correct” interpretation of the material can only be arrived at on each occasion according to the context in which the material was produced. Other analysts seriously question the notion of one correct interpretation of a dream, believing instead that multiple interpretations of a dream may be equally valid, with no one interpretation beating out the truth-value of the others. In other words, the analyst must avoid dogmatic belief in the truth of his interpretations, and even cultivate the attitude of the creative artist in approaching interpretive work.
Freud himself was inconsistent in his opinion on where psychoanalysis lay in the continuum between art and science. As early as 1900, Freud wrote: “The analyst’s work of interpretation (is) not to be brought under strict rules and (leaves) a great deal of play to the physician’s tact and skill” (p. 239). Elsewhere, as will be seen, Freud betrayed his deep desire to have psychoanalysis be viewed by the scientific community as an objective and durable science that remained uninfluenced by the analyst’s subjective impressions.
While Freud admitted in1923 that psychoanalysis began as an art of interpretation, he was deeply influenced by the positivistic attitude that dominated the sciences at the turn of the century, and preferred “pure” observation to interpretation as a method of psychoanalytic inquiry (Rubovitz – Seitz, 1998). He considered mental disorder a natural phenomenon with objective existence, and psychoanalysis to be the one correct scientific theory that reduced all explanations of mental disorder to one fundamental level. There was one reality, theory, method, and cure that reversed the pathogenic process (Omer & Alon, 1997). Freud believed in the validity of his patient’s associations, and suspected a one-to-one correspondence between the patient’s real history and the words they freely uttered about that history in the analytic session. All of the patient’s associations were endowed with a kernel of historical truth, and this kernel was what made the analyst’s interpretations effective (Spence, 1982).
It has been suggested that Freud probably understood that psychoanalysis was truly a hermeneutic and not a natural science, and that he attempted to cover up this knowledge by minimizing the role and importance of interpretation in his methodology, and by never describing his interpretive methods clearly or systematically (Rubovitz-Seitz, 1998). Freud was very sensitive about the scientific status of psychoanalysis, and he tended to overreact if the status of psychoanalysis as an empirical science was brought into question. In the early days of psychoanalysis, Freud outlined specific interpretations to be applied to patient’s material, and was dismayed when his colleagues created alternative interpretations of the same material (Rubovitz-Seitz, 1998). Eager for psychoanalysis to be accepted into the scientific community and find a place in the edifice of established knowledge, Freud seemed to be in a state of denial of what was becoming obvious to his colleagues and to the scientific community at large: there is no one correct psychoanalytic method to follow, and “ . . . interpretive methods in all fields of human study suffer from limitations of reliability” (Rubovitz-Seitz, p. x).
At other times, Freud showed that he understood very well that psychoanalysis involved dialectical play between objective fact-finding and subjective construction. The difference between the valid reconstruction of historical truth contained in an interpretation, and the narratively true creations of the analyst (those that are persuasive as stories), was sometimes thin. On reconstructing the patient’s past, Freud (1905) wrote: “I have no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity. I have restored what is missing, taking the best models known to me from other analyses; but like a conscientious archaeologist I have not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic parts end and my constructions begin” (p. 12, my italics). In spite of this understanding, the presentation of psychoanalysis as a science may have been necessary for Freud to legitimize a new, highly revolutionary discourse (Chessick, 1996).
Freud’s inconsistent vision of psychoanalysis is still reflected in the attitudes of many contemporary analysts, who, like Freud, must contend with knowing psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic, artistic and creative enterprise that has more in common with other interpretive disciplines such as literature and history, amidst growing pressure to produce scientific proof of analytic theories by the scientific community and at the risk of being disrespected by this community if these results do not appear. Struggling with this paradox may be the necessary consequence of practicing a discipline that lies on the hazy frontier between science and art.
