ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis struggles to justify an explanatory system in which many different interpretations of any given clinical phenomenon are possible (cf. Wallerstein 2009). Freud’s metaphor for the process of ‘condensation’ in dreams (Freud 1900) – compressed pack-ice, in which many meanings are somehow jammed together – is attractive but it too needs to be ‘unpacked’. As discussed in Chapter 1, given the multiplicity of available psychoanalytic models, the problem of finding the ‘right’ interpretation in any particular clinical circumstance cannot be glossed over (see Tuckett et al. 2008), fuelling the struggles for authenticity and authority that characterise psychoanalytic politics.
