Psychoanalytic and Scientific Reasoning

In daily life we find meaning and motive in the actions of persons (and other animals) naturally, spontaneously and continually. Let us speak of the mental capacities, modes of inference, or ways of thinking by which we do so as those of interpretation as Freud did in speaking of the interpretation of dreams. We apply our ability to interpret, in this sense, both to passing events or episodes in behaviour, such as motivated actions and the production of meaningful sentences, and also to lasting results of such behaviour, such as written texts.

Freud intended psychoanalysis to be an interpretive science. To many the idea that something is a matter of interpretation already implies that it cannot be scientific or even objective, so that this idea seems paradoxical. Such a dismissal, however, ignores the fundamental role which interpretation plays in our lives and understanding generally. Our interactions with others are mediated by interpretation of their behaviour, and our fate often depends upon how we do this: for example, on our capacity to detect and respond to love or hate, friendship or emnity, and many other motives. Again, it is through interpretation, taken broadly, that we understand language; and much of what we know seems registered in language or understood through our use of it. We cannot generally claim a firmer grasp on any of the phenomena we use language to describe than we can on the language which we use to describe them; and to use language with grasp is to use it according to determinable rules, and hence in a way which can be interpreted. This indicates that there is a sense in which we understand nothing better than our own language, and in that sense, ourselves. In this perspective interpretation could be regarded as prior to science; and the limits of interpretation - whatever they are - would be those of communicable science as well.1

It seems right to say that the pervasive role of interpretation in psychoanalysis sets it apart from many oth