You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book, which is not a straightforwardly ‘easy’ read, is organized into six chapters focusing on one of the fundamental themes of psychoanalysis -interpretation. On the cover there is an image in bold colours. At a glance, it appears as though it is of a bunch of white, red and blue anemones, seen through an unfocused and perhaps moving lens. But this is a Kandinsky painting and the title of the picture is Black Strokes. Already, we find ourselves at the heart of the complex interpretative process, an act which is both wise and naive, finished and yet always open, thanks to a few ‘strokes’ which escape interpretation or impose themselves upon it, determining it, blocking it or re-launching it.
The first chapter opens unexpectedly with a retreat (or an expansion?) to autobiographical material with an intensely emotive tone. It is as though the author were going to outline the place, the places, the presences, the feelings and the experiences of life in which the patients’ communications find welcoming spaces, points of resonance, areas of quiet working-through. In this space which is geographical, temporal, historical, affective, nostalgic - a space in which questions hide that may lack answers - we encounter the author's two analysts and the strength of feeling he has for them; we are told of the author's experience of reading an Introduction to Psychoanalysis in Greek at the age of 20; and we encounter Greece: the colonels, the metaphysical oppression of the dictatorship and, of course, his mother, his family, and the struggles. There is a strong sense of the ‘exiled sailor’ who carries the harbour (and hence his home) inside himself, someone who is in touch with the kind of suffering which could kill him. This pain is evoked in the words of the author's first analyst who feels unable to return to Chile for fear of being unable to survive this emotion.
The second chapter, ‘Interpretation as Explanation of Meaning’, is difficult, almost severe in the demand it impo