When we make a formal interpretation, we are finding a narrative home for an anomalous happening. We are using language to clothe this event in respectability and take away some of its strangeness and mystery, and by fitting the language into the patient's life story, we are giving it a narrative home. The linguistic and narrative aspects of an interpretation may well have priority over its historical truth, and we are making the somewhat heretical claim that an interpretation is effective because it gives the awkward happening a kind of linguistic and narrative closure, not because it can account for it in a purely causal sense. An interpretation satisfies because we are able to contain an unfinished piece of reality in a meaningful sentence; that is part of what we mean by finding its narrative home. The sentence acquires additional meaning when it meshes with other parts of the patient's life; it acquires narrative force by virtue of these connections, and adds narrative understanding to what is already known and understood. The power of language is such that simply putting something into