ABSTRACT
Bion drew our attention to interpretation in a most simple and deep way when he noted, “Worse than being right or wrong is the failure of an interpretation to be significant, though to be significant is not enough; it merely ensures that it exists. It must be also true” (Bion, 1970, p. 79). This is our challenge, to make an interpretation significant and at the same time true. When working with a family, we are presented with what at times can be a bewildering range of choices about how to respond. We are all aware that choices depend on numerous factors, but undoubtedly it stems from the analyst’s explicit and implicit theories about psychoanalysis as a general theory of psychic functioning, and families as a specific psychoanalytic object. My assumption is that when seeing families, the presence of the members allows conjecturing about how meaning is borne out of what they do in the presence of the other and with the presence of the other. How this presence impacts on the members of a family group, and how this effect results from being part of specific relationship, something that the participants of the link cannot view, means that interpretation can only aim to describe and infer its meaning. There always exists a tension between the individual internal representation of the family and the effects of being in the family in the real presence of the others. Hence, I consider that an important task of interpretations is to describe what can be named as the atmosphere, the climate in the session which includes all the members (and sometimes the analyst as well). I try to grasp it through what they say, what they do not say, what they are trying to do with what they say, and of course, through the scrutiny of the impact that all of these have on the analyst’s mind (countertransference), as can be illustrated in what follows.
