Interpretation and action

pp. 42-59

in: Uri Hadar, Psychoanalysis and social involvement, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

I already had occasion to mention one of Lacan's more far-reaching insights, namely, that interpretation alone, due to its infinitude, cannot exhaust the therapeutic impact of analysis (Lacan, 1958a/2006). One can always go on interpreting and the idea of reducing the unconscious in this manner does not hold, because the unconscious also grows with interpretation. Whereas interpretive processes carry the benefit of growth and enrichment, they lack something fundamental because the self is consolidated on a different plane, which I call the ethical plane. This relatively simple insight, reiterated in both Lacan (1958a/2006) and Schafer (1976), reframes in a radical way the psychoanalytic bias toward interpretative interventions. Classically, the psychoanalytic process is characterized by the contrast between understanding and doing, analyzing and enacting. The latter, enactment, is conceptualized as a form of resistance, maybe even its paradigmatic form. This idea is guided by the principle whereby, "In analysis, that which does not appear in the form of memory or interpretation will appear in the form of enactment or of resistance". To evaluate this truism, one needs to understand the critical difference, subject wise, between analyzing and enacting. In my mind, what is crucial here is that memory and interpretation are always about something else whose existence precedes its appearance in analysis.