The First Direct Analysis of Transference and Countertransference

Psychoanalysis never takes place in the absence of interpretive beliefs and values. Based on this ineluctable fact, supremacy is often ascribed to the various perspectives on interpretive activity. Yet a number of other things does not take place in the absence of interpretive perspectives either—such as teaching, farming, motorcycle maintenance, not to mention all the other forms of psychotherapy in addition to psychoanalysis that take shape in an interpretive and speculative context. This holds, in my view, so long as the context of interpretation is not confused with the dynamics of experience being lived and worked through within that context. The existence of psychodynamics is not, itself, a product of interpretation. It arises in the direct experience of striving and feeling, thinking and imagining, saying and doing, that may or may may not be interpreted later. The preference for interpretive matters always comes down, finally to questions of choice, not only about the line of interpretation taken, but about the time and attention and energy devoted to it. Going beyond the empiric of clinical psychoanalytic inquiry is not always necessary, however.