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An interpretation is characterised by both its target and the place assigned to the analyst by the patient at the moment when he speaks. It is in these different respects that Jean-Luc Donnet differentiates between interpretation in the transference (interprétation dans le transfert), of the transference (interprétation du transfert) and transference interpretation (interprétation de transfert). As we shall see, each of them gives a different weighting to the three essential motive forces of every interpretation.
“You must think that I am really hopeless (indécrottable),1 she said repeatedly. You must find me useless; you must find me boring.
“I must?” the analyst asked, leaving the patient nonplussed for a moment.
“You must…? she responded, suddenly meditative. The analyst had simply taken up the patient's words and extracted them from the opaque wrapping of their apparent banality in order to let them deploy new meanings.
The patient did not say: “Perhaps you find me boring?” She did not formulate a hypothesis, but an order. The analyst “must”. Here the interpretation led her to realise that she was trying to induce something in her analyst, and then to ask herself what she had against the analyst or what she wanted from her. The dimension of control masked by her grievance and masochistic position were also revealed, but without violence because the patient may not have heard the brief repetition of her words. This was an interpretation in the transference. Its primary aim is a quality of the relationship to the analyst established on the stage of interlocution: “Interpretation in the transference is an interpretation in the here and now of the session, where the intervention concerns at the manifest level the transference relationship” (Donnet, 1995, p. 184). It does not evacuate the latent content, everything that stems from the subject's infantile history and manifests itself at this moment in the analysis in the words “you must”.