Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (IV)

As Freud now reiterates, the direct, verbal replies of the patient — reflecting as they do the conscious perspective — are never reliable indices of “correct" and “incorrect.” “Yes” and “No” may well, and often do, mean any number of things. Where should the truth-seeking analyst look, then, in order to ground speculation in something less “ambiguous”?

“It appears, therefore, that the direct utterances of the patient after he has been offered a construction afford very little evidence upon the question whether we have been right or wrong. It is of all the greater interest that there are indirect forms of confirmation which are in every respect trustworthy” (263)

But the problem of interpretation, for all the ingenuity of Freud’s argument, is hardly dissolved in this way. We may certainly distinguish better from worse, more from less plausible, as we go about gathering and assembling evidence. Yet this would not, finally, absolve us of the practical art involved — that is to say, precisely the work of interpretation. We may join Freud in believing that our constructions are “validated” by certain indirect “productions” of the patient: slips, dreams, associations, transferential behaviors, and like. (These signal the construction has “landed,” or has been acknowledged and absorbed by the patient’s unconscious.) And this class of validation is surely better than nothing, as an answer to the question of non-tendentious, durable criteria in psychoanalysis. Again, as Freud puts it:

“Only the further course of the analysis enables us to decide whether our constructions are correct or unserviceable. We do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection.” (265)

Nonetheless, an obvious question remains: how do we determine whether any given “production” in the “further course of the analysis” constitutes the sought-after confirmation? Which of course is precisely to demand, once again: by what criteria are these things to be measured?

Let us imagine an example of the testing-procedure Freud adumbrates, which for clarity’s sake we have simplified into discrete stages — even while noting that Freud himself indicates analysis is in practice never so tidy:

1. A patient shows up late for several consecutive sessions, and the analyst feels emboldened to interpret, “Your behavior unconsciously expresses hostility.”

2. The patient, let us say, replies with an emphatic “No,” together with a “rationalization” along the lines of, “The traffic has — quite by chance — been atypically congested the last days, which has prevented my prompt arrival.”

3. The analyst, following Freud’s example, reserves judgment as to whether or not the interpretation is correct — the patient’s “No,” and his way of consciously explaining his behavior, cannot determine the interpretation’s “truth,” one way or the other. This “No” is “ambiguous.”

4. So the analyst waits for “indirect” confirmation of the interpretation, in the form of the patient’s spontaneous “productions” following the communication.

5. Let us suppose that the analyst’s restraint is rewarded by a dream recounted by the patient in the following session — a dream expressing fairly undisguised aggression towards the analyst.

6. The analyst accordingly considers his interpretation vindicated by a “production” that — indirectly — provides “evidence” of the attributed “unconscious hostility,” in as plain a form as we could hope to encounter it.

Now, if we do accept something like this reconstruction as exemplary of Freud’s interpretation testing-procedure, let us then ask ourselves: what really is the epistemic status of this indirect evidence — in this case, the dream that ostensibly corroborates the original interpretation?

A dream, psychoanalysts suppose — as well as slips and other “symptoms,” for that matter — expresses in manifest form the unconscious, latent layers of mind. But why do we believe this? The answer can only be that we believe this about dreams because of Freud’s arguments based on his interpretations of dreams.

And what about the particular dream recounted by the patient? I have not said what it was; I merely said that it expressed “fairly undisguised aggression against the analyst.” But what sort of dream meets such a description? Perhaps the patient dreamt he felt angry at his analyst and, further, attacked the latter with a hammer. If this dream doesn’t constitute “fairly undisguised aggression,” it is difficult to say what would. But are matters ever so simple?

The very “grammar” of primary process, to which dreams submit, precludes anything like unambiguous, “hard and fast” evidence. The patient’s unconscious thoughts have ex hypothesi been disfigured by displacement, condensation, inversion, and the like. Hence the elements of even so “undisguised” a dream as the one I’ve invented might, on Freud’s own terms, conceal their opposites: the “analyst" in the dream might represent the patient himself, the hostility might express affection, and so on. In any event, the determinate meaning of this dream must itself finally answer to the patient’s associations regarding its individual elements — associations which, scrambled by “resistance,” make interpretation, not less, but more complicated.

But this means: everything depends upon the additional, rolling accumulation of “indirect evidence,” the totality of which might well gradually converge on interpretations and reconstructions that accommodate the most data in the most self-consistent form. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that these interpretations and reconstructions will ultimately be founded, not on extra-interpretive “truth makers” — objective evidence providing the unambiguous “Yes” and “No” that patients cannot deliver directly — but on further interpretations and reconstructions. Once we have divested of authority the patient’s first-person reports regarding the contents of their own minds, we seem to have relinquished any hope of recovering a satisfying criterial “replacement.” Certainly we cannot arbitrarily call a halt to the chain of interpretations, with recourse to some putative “fact of the matter.” For it will always be open to the skeptic to counter: how exactly have you come to that “interpretation”? Note bene: not that scientific judgment.