In psychoanalysis, literary criticism and any kind of hermeneutic analytic discipline, a preliminary concern plagues the beginner. How deep, we ask, is it legitimate to go? How detailed an interpretation can we sensibly make? This question arises for the student of literature-'but does the author actually mean that?'-and it plagues those working in the therapeutic profession. Any action or word can be linked to a symbolic meaning. Any number of interpretative layers can be applied and the project of finding links and hidden references is potentially endless. This is especially true for psychotherapists, whose central self governing rule states that once they stop asking themselves how effective they are they cease to have any therapeutic value at all.
The experience of the interpretater/therapist/analyst/critic is one of decryption. We are, we tell ourselves, drawing out more or less flimsy associations and meanings and unveiling segments of a constantly unravelling but nonetheless coherent picture. This feeling can be extremely comforting. It provides the grounding for an important theoretical dogma. If any emotion, any meaning, is therapeutic then it is never OK to stop digging. But how far is it necessary or even acceptable to go? For many analysts the notion of sanity connotes some form of inhumanity. We are all more or less insane, deviating around an unattainable mean with mechanisms that make us more or less stable. If this is true then anyone is a valid subject for therapy and we could all benefit from the agonising soul search of a full course of analysis.
What this constant quest(ioning) generates is ever more uncertainty. Each concrete given we encounter we are forced to deconstruct (a 'science' of perennial doubt), be it a moral or emotional conjecture. Everything we say actually 'says' something else- about us or on our behalf.
This only seems absurd to the outsider. The initiated cease to question the value of a Marxist approach to Jane Austen, a libinal economy at work in the soul of the traumatised. Becoming fully used to the activity of interpretation and deeper interpretation, we stop asking ourselves whether the systems we superimpose retain any meaning or value. We assume they do because they illuminate something but exactly what they illuminate it is not always necessary to see.

Some questions really do not bear being asked; where does our 'self' reside?; am I truly happy?; Can we successfully get on?

What bears asking and what we can bear to ask are rarely the same. We pursue some questions to the point of the ridiculous. Others we break down into ever smaller pieces losing sight of the original frame. When we find ourselves locked into this journey of continual asking we have to consider the possibiluty of stopping. Of carrying on confidant that even if an answer did exist, we wouldn't care to know.