ABSTRACT
This chapter considers diagnostics and the case history as configuring responses to the transferential dynamics of the encounter and its aftermath –to the spiraling of transferential relations from analyst and patient to mentors, relatives, colleagues, strangers, and readers of the case history. It argues that the pragmatic function of an utterance–the way it indexes the situation in which the utterance occurs–is a primary source of the attributions and interpretations of transference. Existential analysts do use many of S. Freud’s techniques–free association, the analysis of transference, and the punctuation of the patient’s discourse by interpretive interventions. The chapter suggests that the psychoanalyst responds less to the referential message the patient is conveying and more to its pragmatic and affective features. It argues that free indirect discourse occurs when patients and analysts are so deeply immersed in their streams of consciousness that they lose narrative perspective.
