Interpretation

The role of the analyst in the treatment is twofold.

First and foremost, he must listen to the analysand, but he must also intervene by speaking to the analysand.

Although the analyst's speech is characterized by many different kinds of speech act (asking questions, giving instructions, etc.), it is the offering of interpretations which plays the most crucial and distinctive role in the treatment.

Broadly speaking, the analyst can be said to offer an interpretation when he says something that subverts the analysand's conscious 'everyday' way of looking at something.

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Freud first began offering interpretations to his patients in order to help them remember an idea that had been repressed from memory.

These interpretations were educated guesses about what the patients had omitted from their account of the events which led up to the formation of their symptoms.

For example, in one of the earliest interpretations, Freud told one patient that she had not revealed all her motives for the intense affection she showed towards her employer's children, and went on to say; "I believe that really you are in love with your employer, the Director, though perhaps without being aware of it yourself."

The purpose of the interpretation was to help the patient become conscious of unconscious thoughts.

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The model of interpretation was set down by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Though only concerned explicitly with dreams, Freud's comments on interpretation in this work apply equally to all the other formations of the unconscious (parapraxes, jokes, symptoms, etc.).

In the second chapter of this work the psychoanalytic method of interpretation is distinguished from the "decoding" method of interpretation by the use of the method of free association: a psychoanalytic interpretation does not consist in attributing a meaning to a dream by referring to a pre-existing system of equivalences but by referring to the associations of the dreamer himself.

It ollows that the same image will mean very different things if dreamed by different people.

Even when Freud later came to recognize the existence of 'symbolism' in dreams (i.e. the fact that there are some iamges which have fixed universal meanings in addition to their unique meaning for the individual dreamer), he always maintained thaat interpretation should focus primarily on the particular meaning and warned against "overestimating the importance of symbols in dream interpretation."