We can define psychoanalytic competence as the knowledge and background necessary and sufficient to understand a therapeutic utterance or interaction. Formed by clinical training and experience, didactic analysis and self-analysis, it is the “analyzing instrument” that we routinely apply to utterances (from either analyst or patient) in order to go beyond their surface structure to reach an integrated understanding of the manifest content, and that we routinely apply to manifest content in our search for latent content. Although psychoanalytic competence has traditionally been invoked to construe latent meanings from manifest content, it is often required simply to construe the manifest content, as we shall see in some of the examples to follow.

It seems important to distinguish between what we will call normative competence and privileged competence. Normative