ABSTRACT
The principal business of psychoanalysis is to interpret and to reinterpret in life-historical perspective the verbal and other utterances of the analysand during the psychoanalytic session. Psychoanalysis is used to establish meaning or significance where none has been apparent, as in the instance of seemingly senseless compulsions, and to increase the intelligibility of its data by establishing the life-historical contexts of that which is to be further understood, as in the instances of dreams and inhibitions. Specifically, the discipline must develop an ordered account of the doings of human beings in a special kind of relationship into which only language-using, historically oriented human beings can enter—the psychoanalytic relationship. The reconceptualization of psychoanalytic theory and interpretation in the terms of action follows Otto Fenichel’s technical argument that the analysand must be brought to recognize unconscious defence as personal activity.
