Interpretation Domestic and Foreign

Abstract

Verbal and nonverbal behavior are on all fours when it comes to interpretation. This idea runs counter to an intuition that, to borrow a phrase, speech is cooked but action is raw. The author discusses some of the most compelling psychoanalytic work on the interpretation of action and presents empirical and philosophical findings about understanding speech. These concepts generate reciprocal implications about the possibility of interpreting the exotics of action and the necessity of interpreting the domestics of speech, treating both as equally dignified aspects of human behavior. The author presents a number of clinical examples to further illustrate these ideas.

• Interpretation
• action
• interpretive action
• nonverbal
• nonsymbolic
• conversational interviewing
• Donald Davidson
• radical interpretation
• malapropism