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This paper was read at the 38th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Amsterdam on the 27th of July 1993; it was published the same year by the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74: 15–24.
There is no such thing as perception without an object, or without another subject. It is only by an effort of abstraction that we can ask ourselves what passes through the mind of the analyst between listening and interpretation. The analyst’s internal process which leads him to interpret belongs from the beginning to an intersubjective situation, however structurally asymmetrical it may be.
Similarly, analytic listening is directed in advance towards an eventual interpretation, whose content is not yet known at the time of listening but which gradually takes shape up to the moment when the interpretation has to be formulated to the analysand. The inter-subjectivity of the analytic dialogue, while describing an essential aspect of the processes with which we are concerned (what happens in the analyst), conceals – and sometimes reveals – another intersubjective type of structure, just as the visible–audible is superimposed on the invisible–unheard of. This second structure, sometimes called the ‘intersubjective field’, underlies as something unsaid or unsayable both the analysand’s material as presented and the analyst’s formulations; in the latter, it determines both the content of
the interpretation and the feeling-conviction that the interpretation must be formulated.
Unlike the ‘wild’ interpretations which may be ‘played with’ in everyday life, a psychoanalytic interpretation does not arise by chance or in isolation. It belongs to – and is part of – a context whose co-ordinates are fixed by the patient’s demand, the analyst’s expectations and the contract defining the analytic situation.
The patient – and even the ‘training’ analysand – asks for analysis because he is suffering from a certain malaise and h