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The notion of repetition compulsion, introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, forces us to re-examine the nature of interpretation, for it calls into question the mutative value of remembering and interpretation, and the effects of rejoining thing-representations and word-representations, as maintained in the theory of treatment elaborated up to 1920. This same questioning can be seen in the technical papers of 1912 and 1914. The earliest notion of interpretation in Freud, as found in his self-analysis, in the Studies on Hysteria, and in the Dora case, was consistent with the interrogation of family members and the historical search for veridical details of the past. But this point of view fell into abeyance because of the failures of this communal exploration and because of the discovery of transference phenomena. This transformation led to a second sense of "interpretation" in psychoanalysis, that which the analyst communicates to a patient when he has understood his unconscious. Drawing on recent philosophical discussions of scientific explanation, Diatkine questions the value of interpretations as explanations of the patient's behavior. He maintains that an interpretation does not have the status of an object of knowledge. It is a way of being in the session, it is the mode of mental functioning of the analyst. The analyst's functioning is comparable to that of the mother of the neonate, in which the interaction with the infant is totally determined by her own fantasy organization as she plays the role of stimulator and bringer of calm, in a way that defies any simple analysis of behavior. In the same fashion the silences and interventions of the analyst are not codifiable, and their "objective" description would not advance our cognitive understanding of the analytic process. Diatkine discusses some examples of interpretations which he thinks are far from the "ideal interpretation" that reveals the "truth" to the patient, but which were efficaciou