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The panel discussion was opened by a presentation on "The Validation of Psychoanalytic Interpretations" by the panel chairman, Charles Brenner. The essence of his presentation was as follows:
The analyst forms a conjecture about his patient, presents this conjecture to the patient as an interpretation at the technically appropriate time, and looks for either confirmation or refutation of his interpretation in the patient's response. The analyst's conjecture is usually formed in an intuitive way, but the steps should be retraceable consciously.
The acid test of a conjecture comes after it has been offered to the patient as an interpretation, and is furnished by the response of the patient. In general the response to a correct interpretation is a lessening of the ego's fear of the id, a relaxation of the ego's defenses, and the emergence of a derivative of the id impulse that was being defended against. Such a response is considered to be confirmatory of an interpretation.
The response may be immediate or delayed. It may be divided into a subjective and an objective part. The former is what the patient reports, the latter is what we can observe. Typical confirmatory responses would include: (1) diminution of anxiety, (2) symptomatic improvement, or its opposite in a case where there was a predominant need to suffer, (3) a confirmatory memory, fantasy, dream or other verbal association, or a confirmatory gesture, all with or without an appropriate emotional experience, (4) a feeling of surprise, recognition, or 'that clicks' on the part of the patient, (5) sudden laughter.
Other types of confirmatory evidence which are not dependent on a lessening of the ego's fear of the id are: (1) repetition of what was interpreted, (2) confirmation of a reconstruction from an external source, (3) ability of a reconstruction to enable the analyst to fit together