ABSTRACT
I’d like to take up a point early in Bernard’s presentation. You said the purpose of interpretation was to keep the material coming. This reminds me of a story of a patient of Klein’s who came 10 minutes late for a session and Klein said ‘You’ve missed the first interpretation!’ and another story about Ernest Jones who only spoke twice during sessions, once to say ‘Hello’ and once to say ‘Goodbye’. One of my patients is a schizophrenic with multigenerational delusional system and if I don’t break into it he will go on forever. There is another patient who exhibits a feature Betty Joseph writes about called ‘chuntering’: there is plenty of material but it’s not about anything - it’s all on the surface and if it has any purpose it is defensive and that too one has to break into. I’ve always thought of the purpose of interpretation in the Kleinian approach being to reach as far as one can into the primitive anxieties and, if you are right, to assuage the anxiety by virtue of hitting the target - not just to keep the material flowing!
