Review of the Literature

The varied psychoanalytic understandings of interpretation are foreshadowed by the diverse preanalytic meanings of the term. An interpreter, for example, is a translator from one language to another, an artist who gives creative meaning to a work of art, a scientist who accounts for a body of data, or a religious figure who reveals the will of God. Each of these usages is analogous to a psychoanalytic theory of interpretation.

Psychoanalytic thinking about interpretation has necessarily developed in conjunction with the evolution of related ideas. Interpretation is inevitably connected to theories of psychopathology (what is to be interpreted) and theories of therapeutic action (how interpretation works). The pluralism of psychoanalytic thought consequently applies to the concept of interpretation, and to examine the literature on this subject is to encounter controversies, past and present.

Freud began with a choice. He first used the word we translate as “interpretation” in a title, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). He chose the German word Deutung, which in common usage referred to seers, who read the future from signs — including dreams. He conspicuously did not choose the word Erklaeren, used by scientific contemporaries to describe their explanations of things. As we know, Freud was more in accord with the popular view that dreams are meaningful than with the “scientific” conception then current of dreams as purely physiological events. By