Freud used the analytic interpretation of symptoms and patients' associations, and the exerting of pressure on the patient, in an attempt to induce the "reproduction" of the deeply repressed memories he posited.[6] Though he reported he had succeeded in achieving this aim, he also acknowledged that the patients generally remained unconvinced that what they had experienced indicated that they had actually been sexually abused in infancy.
The expert, the detective, the analyst, does not take what the subject/patient says and does at face value. The expert interprets what the subject/patient says and does as something other than what she says and does; it is all "gesturing" by the patient--in a language only the omniscient expert can interpret--toward the real, what really is going on, what really happened, to truth, as "he posited." As the expert posited. The expert knows the truth which is always beneath the surface.
To get to the truth the expert "exerts pressure" on the subject/patient. The detective writes in his report that he "succeeded in achieving his aim" of getting a confession even when the recordings show he did not. The expert convinces himself. Freud convinced himself that his patients had been sexually abused even as the patients themselves "generally remained unconvinced."
Subject/patient as palimpsest.
