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Our clinical interpretations depend heavily on our understanding of the meaning of what is transpiring in our patient's mind, our own mind, and in the interaction between the two. How we arrive at this understanding (its methodological grounding, that is) has always been of crucial interest to psychoanalysts. In a broader sense, interpretation means the derivation of underlying meaning in any human pursuit and, as such, has been a central philosophical question in all of the human and social sciences. There is perhaps no psychoanalyst who has studied this methodology as deeply, as broadly, or as wisely as Rubovits-Seitz. This book is his magnum opus, and it is truly magnificent.
The author begins with a historical overview, describing “Freud's Methodological Conflict” between “his positivist ideals … and his clinical need for flexible, nonpositivist interpretive methods,” and the lingering impact this has had upon our current thinking as we, perhaps somewhat hesitantly, turn away from positivism. He proceeds, in an encyclopedic tour de force, to compare our contemporary thinking to the approach of other fields. In the course of this, we are treated to summaries of both language-based models of interpretive methodology (primarily the work of Lacan, Edelson, Schafer, Labov and Fanshel, Clippinger, and various narrative theorists) and nonclinical methods (the pattern model approach, gestalt psychology, systems theory, hermeneutics, structuralism, psycholinguistics, communication theory, semiotics, literary theory and criticism, archaeological decipherment, and the various approaches of the cognitive sciences). All of this is done so concisely and clearly that I found, to my amazement, that I could understand it with relatively little intellectual sweat. After a chapter defending the placement of psychoanalysis as a commonplace psychology, the author turns to the problem of “justifying” our interpretations, that is, of showing that they are indeed susceptible to scientif