A Quick Note on Interpretation and Reconstruction.

The notion of teaching a candidate how and when to formulate an interpretation that will also be part of a work of reconstruction would sound to most training analyst  blasphemous. I know why but I also know why not. Training analysts and psychoanalysts in general have been indoctrinated in the belief that psychoanalysis is an act of free association, thus, to approach it as a systematic work on patients’ verbal expressions distorts the work of the free-floating attention of both analyst and analysand. It would be  interfering with the skill if not the gift of  eliciting the unconscious from consciousness. In a different statement, analysts approach the work of psychoanalyzing as exchanges between patient and analyst that have no rules to guide them as if thinking about rules of psychoanalyzing is anti psychoanalyzing. This settled tradition misses the fact that the discoveries in the field of language about language (the structural nature of communicating verbally and symbolically) permit us to derive certain rules to get to the meaning of the signifiers (words and their equivalents), and also learn from psychoanalysis and child psychology few basics about the  nature of the signifieds (the contents of speech). We Know now how to listen to the seemingly free floating and recognize its anchors in the speakers’ intentions.

I will give an example from a case I mentioned before in one of my posts. A young female patient had a bd relation with her mother who preferred her other daughter who looked more like her and was considered the prettiest of the two. The patient used to spend the first fifteen or twenty minutes of her session reporting her on mother’s reality and lack of love. That reporting was also accompanied by weeping and sobbing. After some weeks of that routine, I said that I am unable to understand if her crying is expression of pain or of anger (first attempt at discerning the possible confusion she has about what se actually feel). The patient was offendedly angry at my remark. The following session she made a comment about the previous session and after a while she said she would like (has!?) to find out which is more important ;to be hurt or to be angry with her mother. She was conscious of her crying but not conscious of her confusion that could also confuse her mother. Not being conscious is not the same as being unconscious. My remark reveals to the patient that a symptom (crying) is a fusion of two opposing psychical entities: Pain and maybe also pleasure.

Thus, psychoanalyzing is not an act of making what is said (crying was saying something…but what?) reveal something that is not said: it is putting in front of the patient what is said and ask him to explain it so we two could understand the same thing. In other terms, psychoanalysis is not essentially the act of revealing something unconscious but revealing something that repulses or distorts something conscious therefore it does not remain withing consciousness. It is easy to talk about psychoanalyzing in terms of psychical processes instead the flawed idea of terminology, mechanisms, defences, and repressions, etc. Moreover, psychoanalyzing would introduce to the patient his time  when he was a child trying to deal with difficulties and was not very successful.

All that is capable to show the patient how his elders participated in establishing hid character or symptom. My patient remembered how her father encouraged silently the division of the family into two camps because he was also incapable of facing the mother in any way. The when to interpret, and how to interpret, and what reconstruct and to leave for the process and transference to handle needs more than posting to manage.

I do not want to leave this topic without bringing to attention that training in psychoanalysis the way they should has to be in a better and more culturally rich than institutes and training analysts who might not have given much though to what they should be doing.