ABSTRACT
A therapist's interventions—both their nature and the manner in which they are made—involve complicated communicative expressions, conscious and unconscious, direct and implied. Although designed primarily to foster a patient's insight into the unconscious basis of his or her madness, sound interventions—especially interpretations—simultaneously and inherently reveal a great deal about the psychotherapist. As psychotherapists have seen, interventions are statements that convey the therapist's attitudes towards ground rules and frames; his or her desired mode of relatedness; the mode of cure by which the patient's madness is to be resolved; the therapist's communicative propensities; aspects of his or her dynamics, genetics, and death anxieties; the state of the therapist's identity and narcissistic balances; and, finally, the therapist's own sanity or madness. Beyond these factors, an intervention reflects a therapist's capacity for holding and containment and may be fraught with still other unconscious meanings and implications.
