“A Local Habitation and a Name”: The Therapeutic Encounter and the Quest for Meaning

Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists have historically and necessarily been interested in what it is that enables change to occur. My own reflections on this question have led to a preoccupation less with issues of feeling and volition than with the matter of meaning. My sense is that the process and outcome of psychoanalytic psychotherapy depends on the extent to which genuinely shared meaning is generated, registered, and communicated in the relationship between therapist and patient. In this paper I shall address the elusive and extraordinarily complex question of shared meaning, initially in the mother/baby relationship and subsequently in the psychotherapeutic setting, with a focus on dreaming and dream interpretation. I shall be drawing both on clinical material and also on Shakespeare's supreme modelling of the essence of the process I am seeking to explore—A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Writing on poetic diction in the 1920s, Owen Barfield stated that: “… meaning can never be conveyed from one person to another; words are not bottles; every individual must intuit meaning for himself, and the function of the poetic is to mediate such intuition by suitable suggestion” (1928, p. 138). This description of the function of the poetic encapsulates rather beautifully and specifically something essential to the therapeutic process. In my exploration of meaning, I shall concentrate on the function both of the dream in the poetry of the analytic conversation, and of the dream interpreter as mediating “intuition by suitable suggestion.” The emphasis is on the shared endeavour, the working together of two minds in the curious and potentially creative relationship of the clinical encounter; it falls on the enormously difficult task of throwing light on what the mind makes of its own experience.

As the issue of meaning becomes more central to ideas about the development of the human mind, so clinicians are engaging, especially attentively, with the role of emotions (in themselve