ABSTRACT
One reservation must be made in general for the art of psychoanalytic interpretation: there will always be interpersonal situations that lie beyond the comprehension and experience and thus hinder or prevent things from going well. The notion that interpretations are to be understood as constructions is derived from Sigmund Freud's fundamental conviction that psychic phenomena must altogether be read as defence formations. From Beyond the Pleasure Principle onwards he saw the whole of life as a detour on the route to death. He perceived this detour as formed by inhibition and repulsion of the natural tendency to relax, immanent in the energy constitutionally given to a being. Freud marked the moment of the finding of language — that is, of a constructive event. He assumed that "the source of the tendency to repression and the capacity for sublimation" had "organic foundations".
