I See What You Mean: Reflections on Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Work in the Academy and in the Consulting Room

What unites my interest in cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis, among other things, is an urge—existential as well as intellectual—to discover meaning, especially in that which one senses has some meaning but in which the meaning, at a manifest or surface level, is opaque at best. One is confronted with a riddle or puzzle: something—a myth, a ritual, a dream—that seems as if it has meaning, but the meaning is not obvious. The challenge is to make meaning emerge where there seemed to be none. That does not mean to simply make up a meaning and impute it to the phenomenon under study; it is a common criticism of any method of interpretation—the art of saying what something “means”—that it is merely “subjective” and not capable of validation. One can, so it is said by critics, say what one pleases and assert it is the real meaning of the thing, with no standard or test by which to ascertain whether or not the meaning one proposes is the meaning, if there is any, that is actually there. Since I have no wish to be engaged in pursuits that rest only on a cloud, with no necessary relation to the real world, I am mindful of the need to justify by some method or other any assertion that the meaning that results from an act of interpretation, whether of a cultural production in anthropology or of a dream, symptom or unconscious fantasy in psychoanalysis, is not simply the product of my own imagination. When I publish an article or book in anthropology, or make an interpretation in the course of a clinical analytic session, I want to be able to defend the view that the meaning I have found is really there. So, in brief, the way I decide whether an idea of mine is ready to be published, or whether

I should make a certain analytic intervention, is determined by my judgment as to whether it is likely to be in some sense valid beyond my own subjective opinion of it. In order to do this, I need to have an idea of what “meaning” is, and how y