Interpretation and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis

There is a fundamental difference in outlook between an interpretive effort that attempts to help the patient arrive at a truth, the existence of which the analyst has implicitly pre-existing knowledge, and an interpretation that inherently derives from a question to which the analyst does not yet have an answer. Drawing upon a number of clinical examples, I have tried to illustrate this distinction, arguing that the latter outlook, though difficult to sustain, will lead to a methodology which more rigorously focuses on the patient's psychic reality as our sole preview. New vistas of human experience may then be opened to us that may not otherwise have been contemplated.