Lacan sought to redefine psychoanalytic interpretation based on several ideas. He believed interpretations had become too abundant, losing their therapeutic impact. Rather than focus on meaning, Lacan advocated "interventions" to create "waves" across psychic layers. The goal was not for the patient to consciously understand, but for the interpretation to unleash unconscious truth. A true interpretation would extinguish, rather than explain, a symptom through poetic truth. Lacan emphasized that progress occurs through speech itself, not insight into unconscious contents. The analyst must speak oracularly to impact a psyche structured through language and overdetermination.

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CLINICAL NOTES
ON INTERPRETING IN ANALYSIS
Bruce Fink (2007). ‘Interpreting,’ Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian
Approach for Practitioners (New York and London: W. W. & Company), pp. 74-100.
The term ‘interpretation’ is widely misunderstood because it is invoked in a number
of different areas including literature, philosophy, theology, and the human sciences.
The purpose of these clinical notes however is to focus on and explain what Jacques
Lacan meant by this term in the Lacanian clinic.
It is also possible to compare and contrast the use of this term across a number of
schools of psychoanalysis, but that would be beyond the scope of these clinical notes.
The first thing to note is that the Lacanian model of interpretation was being forged
at a time when patients were being given too much interpretation in analytic clinics.
There were even situations when patients had become better at interpreting their
symptoms than the analysts.
So the ability to interpret as such was not therapeutic because the sense of shock or
surprise that was associated with the Freudian clinic at Vienna had started to
disappear as analysis and analytic methods spread around the world.
Patients, to put it simply, had got used to interpretation.
Lacan need to revive the analytic clinic without giving up completely on
interpretation. So he decided to re-invent it.
This basically meant asking what is it that was truly therapeutic in the analytic situation?

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Freud had for long maintained that it was not the analyst’s interpretation that was
therapeutic; it was the patient’s interpretation of his own symptom that was
therapeutic in the analytic situation.
That meant that Freud was proceeding along a model of interpretation in the strong
sense. The only question then was whether the analyst should do most of the
interpretation or whether the patient should do most of the interpretation.
Lacan however began to feel that it is much more therapeutic if the analyst could
work along the idea that symptoms are ‘over-determined’ and subject to ‘deferred
action.’ These, incidentally, are Freudian ideas that were revived by Jacques Lacan
who immediately realized their importance for a theory of interpretation.
What this meant was that the advent of sexuality in the neurotic subject must be
understood to be diphasic in its origins. The meaning of a symptom – insofar as it
constitutes the sex life of the subject - becomes established only through forms of
psychic over-determination and deferred action.
The symptom is therefore subject to a number of conflicting meanings. What this
means is that every layer of the mind contributes, as it were, to the production of a
neurotic symptom.
In order to make the symptom go away, it was necessary to inquire into what it
means in and to each of these different layers. This could be done in sequence using
the archaeological approach that is associated with Freud.
Alternatively, the Lacanian approach was to go beyond the model of meaning and
instead try to impact on the subject through acts of interpretation. These
interpretations were designed to make ‘waves’ in the patient’s unconscious.
The waves were necessary not because Lacan was trying to impress the patient, but
because the psyche was structured in a number of layers. The waves were an
attempt to impact across these layers of the psyche through an intervention rather
than work through layer after layer in the archaeological approach to analysis.

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If the intervention was not well-designed, it would not be strong enough to shake up
a symptom that was over-determined in terms of structure, origins, and function in
and across the different layers of the psyche.
That is why Lacan began to argue that an interpretation which the subject
consciously understands is not a psychoanalytic interpretation.
Furthermore, if the patient gets used to interpretations they could become the subject
of his demand rather than his desire.
That is the patient could use interpretations as a psychic defence and will not be
willing to drop them since they are imbued with a lot of meaning.
This can even go to the point of suffering since the patient will be convinced that it is
worth suffering if there is a meaning behind the symptom.
The analysis then becomes a form of religious experience and will be mediated by
fantasies of ‘suffering and redemption’ in the locus of the symbolic Other.
These then are some of the reasons why Lacan began to argue that what is
therapeutic is not interpretation as such but interventions.
In an intervention, the focus is on ‘how’ the patient speaks rather than worry about
what he is saying since in the first instance it is not possible that either the analyst or
the patient should be able to understand what is being said.
A number of Lacanian techniques were invented like punctuation, scanding, editing
and so in the context of the variable session in order to make these interventions
possible.
The point however was not to be done with interpretations as a hermeneutic legacy,
but to rethink what is at stake in an interpretation using a formal approach like those
of the structuralists in the ‘human sciences’ in France.
Lacan was also haunted by the idea of ‘what is said’ and what ‘remains to be said’ in
analysis.

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The fundamental requirement in analysis is not to talk non-stop and share every
minute of the patient’s life with the analyst, but to say whatever appears on the surface
of the mind without asking whether it is relevant.
A great deal of the analytic literature is an attempt to make sense of whether or not
patients can follow this rule in the analytic situation and the various forms of
resistance that make it difficult to follow this rule.
Even the dynamics of the transference and the counter-transference is understood in
terms of the patient’s difficulties in following through this rule to the end of the
analysis.
For Lacan, progress in the analysis is not about moving from the realm of the
unconscious to that of consciousness, but to the locus of speech. This is not widely
understood and is a perennial source of misunderstanding.
Lacan took the idea of a ‘talking cure’ quite literally. The patient cannot be cured if he
does not talk.
So it is not about looking into areas of the mind that the patient is not aware of as
such, but in also being willing to put into words what he intuits about these areas
through acts of free-association.
In order to make waves then the analyst must speak like an oracle.
Lacan’s ‘Discourse of Rome’ in 1953 was an embodiment of what this means in
articulating a theory of language and the unconscious that are over-determined.
Lacan’s axioms of interpretation, to summarize Bruce Fink, include the following:
‘An interpretation that can be understood is not a psychoanalytic interpretation.’
‘An interpretation cannot present just any old meaning.’
‘Interpretation is an enunciation without an enunciated.’
‘An interpretation is not the testing of a truth that would be decided by a yes or a no,
it unleashes the truth as such.’

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‘Interpretation…points to desire, to which it is, in a certain sense, identical. Desire is,
in sum, interpretation itself.
‘It is only through equivocation that interpretation operates. There must be
something in the signifier that resonates.’
‘It is insofar as an apt [juste] interpretation extinguishes a symptom that the truth
can be specified as poetic.’
Some of these axioms will be taken up for interpretation in these clinical notes in the
future.
Suffice it to say that the readers of these clinical notes will now at least have a
synoptic view of what Jacques Lacan and Bruce Fink mean by the term
‘interpretation’ in analysis.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN