Letter to the Editor

To the Editor,

I thank Dr Rusbridger for his response. However, I would like to correct what seems to me a misreading of my paper. I do not wish to suggest that the work of the analyst is to solve riddles. In fact, just the opposite: I believe that there are particular moments in an analysis when the work of interpretation is caricatured or reduced, by the patient or by the analyst, to the task of solving riddles. I wanted to think more deeply about these moments - about how these scenarios emerge between patient and analyst and how we might respond so that the analytic work can recover its true proportions, its healing dimensions. Rusbridger’s paper seemed to me to offer a vivid example of this predicament: a moment of extreme pressure towards interpretation (which I characterize as a moment of “meeting the Sphinx”). In such an atmosphere, the analyst’s words may not function as interpretation, but as riddle solving. I am not trying to denude the analyst’s function, as Rusbridger suggests in his reply, but rather to point out the very real constraint on interpretation that may emerge at just this moment.