You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A symposium on psychoanalytic technique and interpretations, reported in this issue, discusses Interpretation and the Analyst; Interpretations and the Analysand; Forms of Interpretation in Various Clinical Situations; Specific Aspects of Interpretation; Child Analysis and Interpretation; and Problems in Learning Psychoanalytic Technique. Only a few of many excellent articles among the sixteen presented can be abstracted here.
Mauricio Abadi, writing about 'verbalization', states that speech originated from a defense mechanism of obsessive nature. Verbalization serves to control, to effect action at a distance, and to confer magical omnipotent power. 'Its importance during the analytic work is due mainly to its unconscious value as a magical instrument and to its power of producing action at a distance.' If these elements are not taken into consideration and speech is treated as a logical instrument, any verbal communication of the analyst will have the functions of a magical instrument for the purpose of controlling someone else.
G. T. de Racker speaks about the formulation of interpretations. Her manner has something, as she says, of the quality of a nursery rhyme. In her experience, '… any interpretation, regardless of content, must be felt as "good" by the patient or it will not eliminate but provoke anxieties … or denial … or violent opposition to it…'. One of her patients tried 'to seduce and bewitch' her like Scheherazade.
Diego Garcia Reinoso discusses the interpretations given to hypochondriacs and patients with conversion symptoms, stating that 'in any character manifestation there is always an implicit body fantasy'. He observed this in obsessives also, 'in whom the body is alien to the ego just as much as is the affect'. In a female patient with conversion symptoms he was able to demonstrate how 'in each muscular contraction there was a fantasy of her father or of herself identified with him or, rather, with the "hand-penis" of the father. The pain