ABSTRACT
With his technical and intellectual equipment, the analyst undertakes to perform in a special way, and to encourage his patient towards a similar performance, namely to utilize consciousness (or the derivatives of unconscious processes) for the purpose of verbal thought, as distinct from action. This amounts to an undertaking to ‘contain’ the infantile aspects of the mind and only to communicate about them. This communication is the analyst’s interpretative activity which will, in time, contribute to the patient’s capacity for ‘insight’. (Meltzer, 1967:xii)
The aim of this paper is to examine certain aspects of psychoanalytic interpretation and to suggest that psychoanalysis can best contribute to the understanding of culture and society through its understanding of mind.1 What Meltzer is saying in the above quotation differs from more conventional, and especially from hermeneutic, ideas about interpretation. It may be useful to make a distinction between the ‘process’ of psychoanalysis and other aspects of psychoanalysis which might for convenience be summed up under ‘content’. A comparable distinction was made by George Devereux (1967) between psychoanalysis as ‘epistemology and methodology’ and psychoanalysis as ‘substantive data and theory’. The problem of defining precisely what content, if any, is specific to psychoanalysis will not be taken up here.
