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Dr. Levy has written a slim but concise volume directed to therapists-in-training and their teachers on how to best handle interpretations in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and analytically derived therapies. The book grew out of the author's experience in teaching psychoanalytic theory and technique and observing the difficulties most students had in making interpretations to patients, “I have repeatedly observed that even the most serious, dedicated, and talented students … resort to a very unnatural, cliché ridden, and often counterproductive mode of interpretation. This seems to be based upon what is actually a caricature of the relatively silent, detached analytic therapist. Observations come to sound like accusations or demands for confession, often superficially camouflaged by such awkward introductions as ‘it seems to me that’ or ‘perhaps this can best be understood as.’ Such unnatual and stilted preambles to interpretations [are] wide-spread and somehow communicated from generation to generation of therapists.”
Interpretations are defined broadly, “involving observations, explanations, hypotheses and reconstructions.” They expose, clarify, question, support, contradict, remind, explain, connect. The interpretive process is the central therapeutic activity of the therapist. By this means he communicates to the patient an understanding that allows the patient to see himself “in a less distorted, frightened, ashamed, guilty, or hopeless way.” Together the therapist and patient define a way of thinking, a mode of communication, which determine what form the patient's new self-knowledge will take. The author proceeds on the premise that skillful interpretation is much more than an intuitive art requiring merely the adoption of a warm, empathic therapeutic stance; rather he insists “that certain formal guidelines, rules and principles help make interpretation a skill or technique that can be learned, improved upon, and studied.”
The organization of the boo