Meaning, Mind, and Self Transformation: Psychoanalytic Interpretation and the Interpretation of Psychoanalysis

This book will elucidate the scientific, philosophical, and hermeneutical basis of contemporary psychoanalysis and its key methodology, interpretation, with an aim to clarifying the prevailing diversity of theoretical perspectives. Psychoanalysis today is at a crossroads, where to remain a viable approach to psychotherapy and human understanding, it must come to terms with its own nature and place in the world. The central element of psychoanalytic process is interpretation of the unconscious meaning of the patient’s free associations and transference. Interpretation, the basis of all technique, provides important clues about the nature of psychoanalysis itself. The author begins with a consideration of interpretation itself as it occurs in life, theory, and the consulting room. He considers the roles of interpretation in the two foundations of psychoanalysis: science and humanism. Then he takes up the major schools of thought and treatment approaches and how each is guided by its own understanding of interpretation as it reveals the depth and development of the patient’s experience within the context of the healing process.