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When we give an interpretation in response to the patient's free-associations it is not the same thing as transforming the free-association, and yet it could be said to be not very different. Is it really an interpretation, or are we transforming what the patient says into something entirely different? Freud considered that a great many ordinary sexual facts, with which everyone is acquainted, are treated as if they do not exist and then transformed into all kinds of phenomena which are said to have nothing whatever to do with sex.
It might be worth considering another phenomenon with which we are all familiar, that is, money or mechanisms of exchange, the exchange itself being a kind of transformation. If you have money with which you buy a car, or a house, or landed property, it could be said that you are transforming your money into a car. If you buy an analytic session you could say you are paying for so many minutes of a psychoanalyst's time. Judging by the present day economic chaos, workable exchange mechanisms seem to present difficulties for the human race. An adequate currency is essential in commerce; it is no less essential in language. Psychoanalytically the inadequate currency is our preoccupation – not what works, but what does not work. We have to be adequate psychoanalysts, but we do not have to be unaware of our inadequacy; admiring established so-called ‘classical’ analysis is not part of practising psychoanalysis.
The Babel myth is a good description of a way in which an almighty god can create such chaos that people cannot even cooperate in the building of a tower. Different languages make it difficult for one nation to talk to another – a matter of importance to us who would like to feel that analysts throughout the world could talk a common language. Mathematicians have not achieved this.
Intuitionism is still controversial; so is quantum mechanics. I hope it is true of psychoanalysis. I have not been convinced that our capacity for controver