Evolving Perspectives on Interpretation: Foreword

The 29th annual international conference on the Psychology of the Self, in 2006, focused on an exploration of significant changes in self psychology since the death of Heinz Kohut 25 years earlier. As part of that exploration, I chaired a panel on “Evolving Perspectives on Interpretation,” which included original papers by Anna Ornstein and Shelley Doctors. Edited versions of those papers are presented in the articles following this foreword, along with comments by each author in reaction to the ideas of the other. The following introductory remarks are intended to orient the reader to the material that follows, elucidating the historical context from which these ideas emerged and the directions in which the authors' current thinking took them.

In the context-driven world within which we now know psychoanalytic processes to occur, it may come as no surprise that a panel that started down a path of interpretation ended up somewhere slightly different, with a focus on therapeutic action and on the understanding and modification of complex defensive structures. While the reader can observe how the authors stimulated each other to move in this direction, it is perhaps inevitable that a serious discussion of interpretation would lead to a discussion of therapeutic action, given the role assigned to interpretation historically as the primary agent of psychoanalytic change.

Interpretation is a foundational concept in all psychoanalytic thought. Every psychoanalytic endeavor, starting with Freud, has addressed the concept

in one way or another. Heinz Kohut originally tried to correct what he saw as the over-emphasis on the explanatory function of interpretation by adding a focus on the understanding dimension. For Kohut (1984), interpretation involved both understanding and explaining. He also began to allude to the importance of the relational context, or the analyst's human presence (see Doctors, this issue), in determining the effectiveness of interpretive