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In psychoanalysis the notion of ‘work’ is used to describe a process which takes place over time, mixing both conscious and unconscious factors, to produce a transformation. In this way we speak of ‘the work of mourning’ or ‘working through’. The ‘dream-work’ is a particular instance of this, one in which a pressing emotional situation is put into a graphic representation using, to do so, recent available situations and images (day residues). The work of the dream sometimes in itself brings mental shifts in the patient, because something has been psychically worked at and transformed into dream representation, even before it is consciously understood. In that sense the work of the dream is not only the process of transformation into graphic representation but also a process of working through psychic distress, making it more manageable by using the dream space as a container, as will be discussed further in the next chapter.
I am suggesting in this chapter that the work of interpretation belongs in this category of ‘work’. In the literature I found that ‘the work of interpretation’ usually refers to the conscious work the analyst does when making an interpretation, and sometimes to the effect of the interpretation on the patient. Freud refers to the work of interpretation in relation to the interpretation of dreams to describe the unravelling of the dream thoughts which proceed as the reverse of the dream-work (Freud, 1942, 1943), suggesting a conscious, ego-orientated process.
I use the notion of ‘work of interpretation’ or ‘interpretation work’ (as opposed to ‘giving an interpretation’ or ‘interpreting’) to emphasise the unconscious work of transformation, related to what Bion calls “dream-work-α” (1992).