The Problem of Interpretation

I shall limit myself to an inventory of how analysts actually interpret, mentioning cursorily those facts which are well known (3), and emphasizing those problems which have not yet been formulated clearly enough and should become subjects of further research. I shall start by discussing the place of interpretation in analytic technique, from the point of view of those dynamic changes which we call insight (6), (11), produced in the patient by interpretations.

First I wish to stress that interpretations do not represent the sum total of the analyst's interventions. Some interventions of the analyst make it possible for interpretations to have the desirable dynamic effect. Other interventions create conditions without which the analytic procedure would be impossible. Among those that are necessary are all those which induce the patient to follow the fundamental rule (7), (8), the purpose of which is to loosen the barrier or censorship existing normally between conscious and preconscious processes, and this, in turn, indirectly leads to loosening the barrier between preconscious and unconscious phenomena (9): in other words, it permits the patient's associations to be more decisively influenced by the primary process (10). The patient's adherence to the fundamental rule is facilitated among other conditions by—at least in the majority of cases suitable for psychoanalysis—the recumbent position (14). This we know is contraindicated in the analysis of children (4) and sometimes of adolescents, and in the treatment of schizophrenics (2) and of some borderline cases (28). Experience has proved it to be unsuitable or harmful in these cases; hence the conclusion that the recumbent position has a positive, dynamic function, and not only serves the convenience of the analyst. The recumbent