Criteria for Interpretation: Susan Isaacs. Int. J. Psa., XX, 1939, p. 148.

Miss Isaacs discusses the criteria at our disposal for judging the correctness of our interpretations. The determinant is always the patient's total reaction—sometimes the immediate, frequently a subsequent one. Incorrect interpretations usually make no impression whatever. Interpretations which are correct in content but are dynamically or economically incorrect (given in an inappropriate connection) or which are only partially correct, create or increase the anxiety of the patient, sometimes so specifically that his reaction often shows us the nature of our mistake. Correct interpretations find confirmation in various ways: the patient recognizes their correctness immediately; new memories emerge; the interpreted impulse becomes clearer and more specific in some other way; further associative material appears, or the general attitude of the patient changes; forgotten material, e.g. forgotten dreams, emerges; the patient develops a new understanding of his present reality; but over and above all a specific diminution in anxieties occurs or there is a change in the content or direction of the anxieties, particularly with reference to the transference. Reconstructions of the childhood history of the patient find confirmation through other and new recollections, through correlation of hitherto chaotic material, through objective confirmation, through clarification of hitherto incomprehensible attitudes. The author then considers the scientific validity of psychoanalytic conceptions, particularly similarities and differences in the analytical and the experimental situations. She comes to the conclusion that psychoanalytic perceptions are of natural scientific character.