The Other

Abstract

When we take a step back from the content of a statement and look at its existential conditions we make an interpretative move, but are also carrying out an action. Such an ‘act of interpretation’ always puts the patient’s words vis-à-vis a certain otherness, something that is not exactly what he said. This is what makes for the fundamental challenge that interpretation poses. It invites — and perhaps even forces — the patient to live with a statement that relates to something that resembles, but is not wholly identical, to what he said. Again, as was the case with the dream, the patient cannot but perceive the interpretation as something that relates to what she has been saying, and yet the interpretation always significantly diverges from it. Psychoanalytic ‘working through’ precisely implies that the patient has to hear his own words as something different — more or less — from what he himself said. Consider, for example, the differences between a number of interpretations of the statement, ‘My sister always comes to visit me at the most inconvenient times’. Many are the ways in which we may respond to or interpret this statement.