Key words: Interpretation, unconscious, symbolic translation
The present article gives a theoretical – not clinical – definition of the interpretation. The psychoanalytic interpretation is different from other interpretations only because of its object, which is the unconscious. There are different kinds of interpretation: final, functional, symbolic and diagnostic. The psychoanalytic interpretation, however, does not consist of unearthing unconscious intentions or hidden functional goals, it is not even a kind of symbolic translation. Rather, it is an operation of genetic reconstruction aiming at defining an unconscious structure of meaning, whose traces are to be found in the language. From this perspective, psychoanalysis is a science of traces.