ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with two concretely oriented analytic questions concerning time and place, the answers to which also touch on substance, person, and activity as they appear in analytic interpretation. It reviews of some of the main features of the construction of analytic interpretations. The way in which one defines clinical psychoanalytic interpretation depends on one’s general conception of the events that take place in the psychoanalytic situation. In interpreting or retelling the analysand’s narrative performances, the analyst follows certain storylines of personal development, conflictual situations, and subjective experience that are the distinguishing features of his or her analytic theory and approach. Reductiveness is not to be deplored, for it is inherent in any tracing of significant themes or developmental sequences in psychoanalysis as in all other interpretive disciplines. Clinical analysis is terminable; it is analytic interpretation that is interminable.
