The interpretation of behaviour in psychodynamic terms serves both as a mode of explanation and as an agency of therapeutic change. Although there is some discussion of the relation between these roles, the main purpose is to investigate the way in which it carries out it's explanatory function. This is done with special reference to some of those rational and empirical principles which are regularly said to characterise "scientific" procedures, and to be absent from psychodynamic ones. But since human behaviour is characteristically purposive
'intentional' and expressive, end since interpretation is typically concerned with what such behaviour means or represents ( and with the method of communicating such inferences), some affinities are explored with artistic interpretation which also has elements of explanatory analysis and executive communication ( chh. 2, 8). A second principal analogy is the understanding
of language, where problems of decipherment, translation and textual criticism are argued to have important parallels, in their rationale and use of evidence• with psychodynamic interpretation ( esp. ch. 7). This leads to the suggestion
that many psychodynamic concepts refer to ( or are in some sense 'models of') generative or transformative mechanisms relating underlying structures to particular behavioural episodes. This in turn reflects our main contention ( esp. ch. 5) about " scientific principles", which is that the appropriate paradigm for human behaviour is that of structure-modelling ( in the wide variety of ways used in real, rather than stereotypic, " science''), rather than that of hypothetico-deductive experimentalism. From these points of view, psychodynamic interpretation is defended against some familiar but misdirected criticisms to do with its supposed lack of precision and objectivity, and its reliance on
contaminated evidence ( esp. ch. 4). Suggestions are also made passim about ~eating valid features of such criticism.