In this paper, the author defends a hermeneutic understanding of psychodynamic analysis as a form of interpretation which contains much in common with interpretation in the arts and is radically distinct from explanation in the natural sciences. The concept of interpretation is

analysed in terms of four criteria, one of the most significant of which is the idea of foregrounding, a concept taken from the Prague Structuralist movement; it enables us to find analogies for the phenomenon of displacement in the selective attention which is involved in any act of interpretation in the arts or in the social sciences. It is then argued that the task of the analyst is the rearrangement of elements of the original narrative which the analysand offers. From the paratactic form in which they appear the analyst then creates a new narrative. In conclusion it is argued that this second order activity is closer to the activity of the historiographer than the historian.