14

With reference to two cases presented at the Deauville Congress that illustrate the role played by infantile sexuality in the course of treatment, the author considers the role of interpretation, which, it has been said, should be limited in the case of borderline states. Does this, in other words, mean that analysts are today abandoning the recourse to interpretation? The question posed here is whether the latter should not perhaps be re-conceptualised in its relation to the specific modalities of transference that appear in contemporary clinical experience and in which infantile sexuality occurs in its most archaic forms, producing complex counter-transferential reactions. Bion’s theory of transformations offers a new model of interpretation that aims not to elucidate repressed unconscious representations but rather to constitute a transformational psychic space thanks to the capacity to fantasise provided by analysis.