ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the nature of the activity which underlies the interpretations to which an analyst gives voice. Psychoanalysis has found it useful to adopt the word 'psyche' from Greek, via German, to signify the matrix of a person's mental and emotional life as a whole. Interpretation operates at the point in the psyche where mind and heart come together. The idea of the 'mutative interpretation' has become a standard psychoanalytic concept. Donald Winnicott emphasised the need to wait a long time, if necessary, so as to interpret in terms of a patient's own psychic realities, and for Michael Balint, unobtrusiveness was a quality essential to the analyst's work. Hanna Segal states explicitly that 'the aim of the analyst is only to acquire and impart knowledge'. Bruno Bettelheim's book Freud and Man's Soul describes how subtleties in Sigmund Freud's use of German have been lost in the English translations of the Standard Edition.
