ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a distinction between the narrow sense of psychoanalytic interpretation and the broad area of issues related to the work of interpretation in a more general sense. It summarizes the different types of interpretive work that have been used, described and theorized during the history of psychoanalysis, dividing them into two major groups: direct and explicit interpretations and indirect and implicit interpretations. Psychoanalytic competence is understood as a range of functions that run from listening to the patient's discourse to the interpretation subsequently given to it in the field of clinical interaction – the intervention actually carried out by the psychoanalyst in the clinical dialogue. For analysts belonging to the Freudian tradition interpretations were to be understood as a specific intervention of great value but difficult to carry out: a demanding and sometimes counterproductive act that needed to be preceded by a long phase of preparation.
