The Real Object

James Strachey's 1934 paper on mutative interpretation opens several important questions about the nature of psychoanalytic work and remains a useful catalyst for discussion. Strachey's focus on transference interpretation is often taken as the most salient point of his essay and it is the one addressed by Harold Blum both in his paper of 1983 and in our discussion today. It is one thing for an interpretation to be made explicitly about transference; it is another for transference to have an effect in an interpretation. In the latter, one may interpret through transference rather than about transference, and thus may make a de facto transference interpretation when apparently addressing something entirely different. This idea suggests that a psychoanalytic interpretation may be viewed in terms of what it does, rather than its manifest content. Thus a psychoanalytic interpretation has a performative function and its mutative effects are a product of this function more than of the denotative content. A mutative transference interpretation does something with the transference, over and apart from what it says about it (Austin, 1975).

The very link between interpretation and change that is the implication of the term mutative interpretation is a link that remains controversial 80 years after Strachey's words. Does interpretation effect change or is it an effect of relational dynamics? And is change indeed a relevant principle in psychoanalytic work, or is it rather a form of work more directly related to knowing than to changing?

The very phrase mutative interpretation asserts that there is a generative effect to knowing, that knowing may generate something new: a knowing that is a changing. It is this question, how new subjective effects are possible through an act of knowing, that remains a controversial and fundamental question for psychoanalysis. It is the question opened in Strachey's paper and it is the question that still challenges us today.

Beyond the point, that