ABSTRACT

Written in 1968, a productive year for the development of his theory, D. W. Winnicott begins his paper by telling us that we are reviewing interpretation as one of the “basic principles of the psychoanalytic technique”, and he emphasises the essentially verbal nature of the interpretive exchange. This chapter offers a number of thoughts about Winnicott’s “Interpretation in psycho-analysis” paper, in part because this interesting short work is not widely read and because it provides an opportunity to re-visit interpretation as a central analytic activity, grounded in a particular view of psychoanalytic process. Winnicott has argued all along that serious psychopathology can be described as an early dissociation between the experiences of being and of being with, the true self of the former being sacrificed to the false self of the latter. It is this dissociation that Winnicott suggests can be healed through the interpretive process.