Interpretation: Voice of the Field

Abstract

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst’s interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful not because of what they say but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of “witnessing” patients not only know and feel—they also “know and feel that they know and feel.” They can feel their roles in authoring their own experience. Therapeutic action results: patients “come into possession of themselves.” Interpretations are the outcome of shifts in the interpersonal field, which reveal this new freedom to think and feel. This new freedom allows the creation of the analyst’s interpretations, which therefore serve as a sign of a new way of being in one another’s presence that has now become possible between analyst and patient. Field shifts are jointly created, without conscious intention, and interpretations arise from these shifts. Thus, interpretations are not really created independently by the mind of the analyst, but are instead the voice of the field. A clinical vignette illustrates these ideas.