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Truth is incessant invention since it contradicts itself, since only the provisional is true, only what can be shared.— Edmond Jabès
WE THINK OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AS AN exploration of the mind of the analysand, a search in which we find in him ideas, emotions, motives, which have been there all along but of which he had been heretofore unaware. In its genetic aspect, we imagine the analysis as a recovering of memories which have been stored in the unconscious. An interpretation is a way of pointing to something just below the surface, so that the patient can then find it in himself. Our imagery has been much influenced by Freud's fondness for analogies with archeology.
We are coming to realize that that way of conceiving the process is naive, but are having difficulty replacing it with another model which is truer to reality and yet conceptually clear and usable. We do know that memory is not a matter of passive storage, comparable to documents in an archive or data in a computer, and that the "information retrieval system" of the mind transforms that which it retrieves. An interpretation does more than just find something. We now speak of the organizing function of an interpretation. (Loewald, 1960)
Perhaps the following story, taken from Isak Dinesen's autobiography Out of Africa will illustrate what we have in mind by this "organizing function": Jogona, a Kikuya native on Dinesen's farm