interpretation

Also from Answers.com... Chemotherapy Learn what to expect, and what can be done to improve the experience.

n.

1. The act or process of interpreting.
2. A result of interpreting.
3. 1. An explanation or conceptualization by a critic of a work of literature, painting, music, or other art form; an exegesis.
   2. A performer's distinctive personal version of a song, dance, piece of music, or role; a rendering.

interpretational in·ter'pre·ta'tion·al adj.

Opinion regarding a set of facts. A degree of subjectivity is involved on the part of the individual, based on his or her experience, personality, and biases. For example, after performing a detailed analysis of the financial statements of a company, two financial analysts may differ in their perceptions of what the market price of the company's stock should be.

noun

1. Something that serves to explain or clarify: clarification, construction, decipherment, elucidation, exegesis, explanation, explication, exposition, illumination, illustration. Archaic enucleation. See explain/baffle.
2. Critical explanation or analysis: annotation, comment, commentary, exegesis, note. See words.
3. One's artistic conception as shown by the way in which something such as a dramatic role or musical composition is rendered: execution, performance, reading, realization, rendering, rendition. See performing arts.

n

The translation of radiographic changes seen by the dentist into real variations in the object radiographed for diagnostic purposes.

The aspect of music arising from the difference between notation, which preserves a written record of the music, and performance, which brings the musical experience into renewed existence. While traditionally, since the Romantic era, interpretation has been seen as dependent on a performer's view of the work and his capacity for presenting a plausible view of it to an audience, more recently it has also been taken to embrace an understanding of the composer's own aural vision of the work as affected by the conventions of notation and performance of his time (as embraced by the concept of Performing practice). While there is no substitute for a knowledge of performing practice, the insights brought by intuitive musicianship and trained imagination to the expression of a work are central to its interpretation.

---

(logic) Informally, an intepretation of a logical system assigns meaning or semantic value to the formulae and their elements. More formally, if we consider a language whose non-logical terms include names, function symbols, predicate letters, and sentence letters, then an interpretation of a language specifies the following: (i) a domain, or universe of discourse. This is a non-empty set, and forms the range of any variables that occur in any of the sentences of the language. (ii) For each name in the language, an object from the domain as its reference or denotation. (iii) For each function symbol a function which assigns a value in the domain to any sequence of arguments in the domain. (iv) For each predicate letter a property or relation, specifying which sequences of objects in the domain satisfy the property or stand in the relation to each other. (v) For each sentence letter, a truth-value. The logical constants such as expressions for truth functions and quantifiers will be assigned their standard meanings, via rules such as truth tables specifying how formulae containing them are to be evaluated. See also model theory.

[Th]

The stage in research at which the results of archaeological analyses are synthesized and there is an attempt to explain their meaning or consolidate a knowledgeable understanding of the results. See discourse.

The process of giving an explanation.

Interpretation seeks to bring out, within the confines of the analytic method, the latent meaning of a subject's words and behavior; its aim is to reveal unconscious desires and the defensive conflicts that are linked to them. Technically, interpretation consists in making manifest this latent meaning, in accordance with the rules dictated by the various phases of the treatment.

The first version of the theory of interpretation was delineated by Sigmund Freud in his psychoanalytic study of dreams (1900a) and is applicable to other products of the unconscious, such as parapraxes, slips of the tongue, and symptoms. For Freud, psychoanalysis was an art of interpretation, but he preferred the term "construction" as a description of the core of the psychoanalytical method, that is, the unveiling of the unconscious. This "construction" of the unconscious is entirely a matter of applying successive interpretations to the different aspects of a case. The interpretations allow an overall perspective to emerge and thus define a strategy for the treatment; however, it might also be tactically necessary at times to adjust to unforeseen developments.

Interpretation is not just a matter of what needs to be expressed and its actual utterance: it conveys its own meaning, one that disturbs that defensive arrangements meant to maintain the effectiveness of repression. Care must be taken not to provide a premature "translation" of unconscious content, as this risks discouraging the patient, reinforcing his resistance and creating a purely intellectualized understanding. Firstly, the affects associated with these defensive structures need to come to expression, and this implies a struggle of wills. While interpretation is characterized by the necessary intelligibility of its formulations—its reductiveness—as well as by its closeness to manifest representation, generalization, and theorization, it also has a darker and more complex dimension that relates to the polysemy of language, personal symbolism, or the history of the affects involved. Bringing out these affects opens up an economic dimension in which instinctual energy forces the representation into the open. This is made possible, first of all, through the workings of the transference and the counter-transference.

In "The Dynamics of Transference," Freud insisted that interpretation should not begin before the appearance of the transference, and specified that the goal in interpreting the patient's transference is "to compel him to fit these emotional impulses into the nexus of the treatment and of his life-history, to submit them to intellectual consideration and to understand them in the light of their psychical value. This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on this field that victory must be won" (1912b, p. 108).

What the interpretations communicate to the patient in terms of the construction of the unconscious, and on the basis of the transference, is indissociable from the analyst's reconstruction which is based on the analysis of his own counter-transference. The analyst responds to the transference demands with only a minimum of authority, allowing him to make the counter-transference into a tool for exploring the unconscious of the patient. For Freud, the unconscious of the patient is consequently revealed through the unconscious of the analyst.

The primary goal of interpretation is the lifting of resistance: the cure is not the result of a premature recognition of whatever has been repressed, but occurs through a victory over the resistances at the source of this ignorance. Thanks to the love-transference and the psychoanalyst's patience, the analysand should be able to accept the psychoanalyst's "translation" without these revelations about their unconscious adding to their conflicts or symptoms. Freud rejected any interpretation that is isolated from the symbolic material issuing from the unconscious, and indicated that it would be a mistake to think that the interpretation of dreams is central to all analyses.

As Michel Fain wrote, "While the turning of 1920 [Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920g] shattered the metapsychology of 1915, conceptions from the first topic continued to influence Freud's conception of interpretation" (1983). It would seem useful to emphasize the necessary complementarity of the two topics, neither being able alone to account for the theoretical role of interpretation.

"The path that starts from the analyst's construction ought to end in the patient's recollection; but it does not always lead so far. . . If the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory" (Freud, 1937d, pp. 265-66).

Interpretation has recently become one of the latest focuses in the epistemological debate over the status of psychoanalysis. The "experimental" point of view, in which interpretation is conflated with a generalizable scientific truth that results from verifiable protocols and can be duplicated within the context of multidisciplinary research, includes certain models from psychoanalytical theory, comparing them with other developmental models or conceptual tools from psychopathology.

Conversely, the "hermeneutic" point of view results in a purely relative, narrative, and pragmatic conception of truth, whereby the interpretation is only a new version of the life story that makes the patient feel better. Consequently it tends towards a language of action that valorizes the conscious dimension. Highlighting the narrative point of view obviously involves challenging the status of metapsychology (Schafer, Roy, 1983), but the "scientific" point of view ultimately leads to the same tendency.

A closely related notion, often mentioned when clinical cases are being discussed, is that of "intervention." It is often used by default, when the analyst wants to utter words that are deemed appropriate, without the elements of the construction justifying those words being clearly established. It is given that analysts do not merely proffer interpretations during the session—in addition they may request a clarification, verify an element already referred to in the treatment, encourage the patient to continue speaking, and the like.

However, because of the transferential situation, it is impossible to predict the outcome of these interventions, whose inoffensive, innocent, or insignificant character cannot be affirmed a priori. Jean Cournut has criticized the illegitimacy of this notion, adding that, in his view, "the term 'intervention' should be eradicated from the lexicon of psychoanalysis" (1983).

Bibliography

Fain, Michel. (1983). Introduction. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 67, 3, 707-716.

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE, 4: 1-338; Part II, SE, 5: 339-625.

——. (1912b). The dynamics of transference. SE, 12: 97-108.

——. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 255-269.

Schafer, Roy. (1983). The analytic attitude. London: Hogarth.

Further Reading

Britton, Ronald, Steiner, John. (1994). Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalues idea?, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75, 1069-1078.

Busch, Fred. (2000). What is a deep interpretation? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 237-254.

Friedman, Lawrence. (2002). What lies beyond interpretation, and is that the right question?, Psychoanalytic Psychology,19, 540-551.

Ogden, Thomas. (1997). Reverie and interpretation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66, 567-595.

—JACQUES ANGELERGUES

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The art or process of determining the intended meaning of a written document, such as a constitution, statute, contract, deed, or will.

The interpretation of written documents is fundamental to the process and practice of law. Interpretation takes place whenever the meaning of a legal document must be determined. Lawyers and judges search for meaning using various interpretive approaches and rules of construction. In constitutional and statutory law, legal interpretation can be a contentious issue.

Legal interpretation may be based on a literal reading of a document. For example, when John Doe signs a will that names his wife, Jane Doe, as his personal representative, his intent to name her the administrator of his estate can be determined solely from the specific language used in the will. There is no need to consider the surrounding facts and circumstances that went into his choice.

When the intended meaning of the words in a document is obscure and conjecture is needed to determine the sense in which they have been used, mixed interpretation occurs. In such a case, the words express an individual's intent only when they are correctly comprehended. If John Doe refers only to "my wife" in his will, a probate court will have to determine who his wife was at the time of his death. How a lawyer or judge ascertains intent when words are unclear is typically governed by rules of construction. For example, the general definition of a word will govern interpretation, unless through custom, usage, or legal precedent a special meaning has been attached to the term.

When a court interprets a statute, it is guided by rules of statutory construction. Judges are to first attempt to find the "plain meaning" of a law, based solely on the words of the statute. If the statute itself is not clear, a court then may look to extrinsic evidence, in this case legislative history, to help interpret what the legislature meant when it enacted the statute. It is now common practice for statutes to contain "interpretation clauses," which include definitions of key words that occur frequently in the laws. These clauses are intended to promote the plain meaning of the law and to restrict courts from finding their own meaning.

Concern over whether courts apply strict or liberal methods of interpretation has generated the most controversy at the constitutional level. How the U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution has been widely debated since the 1960s. Critics of the Warren Court, of the 1950s and 1960s, charged that the Court had usurped the lawmaking function by liberally interpreting constitutional provisions.

This criticism led to jurisprudence of "original intent," a philosophy that calls on the Supreme Court and other judges to seek the plain meaning of the Constitution. If plain textual meaning is lacking, the justices should attempt to determine the original intentions of the Framers. Those who advocate an original intent method of interpretation also emphasize the need for the justices to respect history, tradition, and legal precedent.

Opponents of original intent jurisprudence argue that discerning the intent of the Framers is impossible on many issues. Even if the original intent is knowable, some opponents believe that this intent should not govern contemporary decision making on constitutional issues. In their view the Constitution is a living document that should be interpreted according to the times. This interpretive philosophy would permit justices to read the Constitution as a dynamic document, with contemporary values assisting in the search for meaning.

See: judicial review; plain-meaning rule.

The veterinarian's explanation of how the disease process is causing the observed signs and how the laboratory findings are caused by the causative agent.

• clinical i. — explaining all of the clinical signs observed in terms of the lesions thought to be present.
• radiological i. — explaining the observed changes seen in the radiograph.

(DOD) A part of the analysis and production phase in the intelligence cycle in which the significance of information is judged in relation to the current body of knowledge. See also intelligence cycle.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - oversættelse, fortolkning, tolkning, forklaring

Nederlands (Dutch)
interpretatie, vertolking, vertaling

Français (French)
n. - interprétation (d'un songe, etc), traduction orale, interprétation

Deutsch (German)
n. - Deutung, Interpretation, Auslegung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ερμηνεία, εξήγηση, απόδοση (κειμένου, ρόλου κ.λπ.)

Italiano (Italian)
interpretazione

Português (Portuguese)
n. - interpretação (f)

Русский (Russian)
интерпретация, устный перевод

Español (Spanish)
n. - significado, interpretación, versión

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - tolkning

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
解释, 翻译, 演出

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 解釋, 翻譯, 演出

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 해석, 연주, 통역

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 解釈, 説明, 通訳, 演技, 演出, 演奏

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) التفسير, الترجمه ( وبخاصه الشفويه)‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮פירוש, תרגום, עריכת מלים‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.