The Interpretation of Psychic Reality, Developmental Influences, and Unconscious Communication

THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURE OF CLINICAL analytic interpretation is its emphasis on psychic reality. That is to say, interpretation centers on the personal meanings the analysand ascribes, especially unconsciously, to events and actions in the past and present. Typically, these unconsciously ascribed meanings are organized in repetitive fashion around infantile conflicts, fantasies, and modes of thought and feeling. But interpretation deals not only with psychic reality. It is more exact to say that it involves a complex, subtle, and shifting distribution of emphasis on psychic reality, developmental influences, and unconsciously communicated messages. I shall attempt to clarify some of the issues that arise in connection with this shifting distribution of emphasis.

To make the issues concrete, I shall focus specifically on how analysts take their analysands' representations of other people and how they deal with these representations in their interventions. By "other people" I refer to people other than the analyst and analysand, those whom the analyst encounters only in what the analysand says about them. I shall, however,