Construction/Reconstruction

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CONSTRUCTION/RECONSTRUCTION

Constructions are conjectures that the analyst couches in the form of stories concerning a part of the analysand's childhood history and bases on previous partial interpretations. A construction is meant to compensate for absent or insufficient memory, but it may itself stimulate recollection.

Freud spoke of construction in connection with the "Rat Man" (1909d) and, more specifically, in connection with the Rat Man's wish for his father's death, with the circumstances, and approximate date of its emergence. He also spoke of it in relation to the punishment the patient's father apparently inflicted on him for a reason connected with masturbation. This childhood scene, or rather the mother's account of it, was recalled as a result of a construction.

But it was in the case of the "Wolf Man," apropos of the authenticity of the primal scene, that the notion of construction really came to the fore. Freud emphasized in this connection that if primal scenes were simply fantasies, they would never become the basis for recovered memories. But since these dreams that frequently confirmed the self-same content were in his view "absolutely equivalent to a recollection," a patient's conviction of a scene's reality was "in no respect inferior to one based on recollection." Indeed, scenes "which date from such an early period and exhibit a similar content, and which further lay claim to such an extraordinary significance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be divined—constructed—gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications" (1918b [1914], p. 51).

The issue came up once more in Freud's discussion of a young homosexual woman, where he expressed the view that the analyst's reconstruction of the origins of a patient's disorder belongs to the beginning of an analysis, before the analysand takes charge him or herself (1920a, p. 152).

Only in Freud's late paper on "constructions in analysis" (1937d) does he deal with the matter fully. Here again he stressed the preliminary nature of the analyst's work of construction in the two-step process of analysis, arguing that "the work of analysis consists of two different portions, that it is carried out in two separate localities, that it involves two people, to each of whom a distinct task is assigned" (1937d, p. 258). The analyst's job is to divine or rather to reconstruct what has been forgotten, based on clues that have escaped from oblivion. This work precedes that of the analysand, but this does not mean that "the whole of it must be completed before the next piece of work can be begun" (1937d, p. 260). In fact, "both kinds of work are carried on side by side, the one kind being always a little ahead and the other following upon it" (p. 260). The patient's work thus consists in accepting or refusing to accept the analyst's constructions, confirming them or failing to confirm them by means of recollections.

This is far removed from certain later deviations in analytic practice that promote the idea that the analyst be silent. Here we see a kind of practice that takes risks. Freud distinguishes the different meanings of the analysand's "Yes" and "No" and notes that although the "Yes" has no value unless it is followed by indirect confirmations, reciprocally the "No" can mean the incompleteness but not necessarily the inaccuracy of the construction. He goes even further, noting that "the false construction drops out, as if it had never been made; and, indeed, we often get an impression as though, to borrow the words of Polonius, our bait of falsehood had taken a carp of truth" (1937d, p. 262).

The epistemological status of constructions is illuminated by means of two analogies. The first is a comparison to the archeologist's "work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction." The analyst and the archaeologist, Freud writes, "have an indisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains" (1937d, p. 259). The first, however, "works under better conditions and has more material at his command to assist him since what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive" (p. 259). The second analogy is more unexpected and in Freud's discussion it follows an image of destruction, that of psychotic anxiety bound to an inaccessible memory of a terrifying event that actually happened. Freud suggests a parallel between constructions in analysis and delusions: "The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment—attempts at explanations and cure, though it is true that these, under the conditions of the psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had already been disavowed in the remote past" (1937d, p. 268). The distinct nature of truth in psychoanalysis is thus suggested by the notion of construction/reconstruction.

In 1937 Freud regretted that construction had not been the subject of as much later work as interpretation. It has been explored since, however, particularly in the work of Serge Viderman (1970), who developed the question of levels of certitude in relation to the deformations caused by repression, and adopted the notion from Hegel and Freud of a truth that must be constructed and not merely found.

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Amnesia; Anticipatory ideas; Archeology (metaphor); Autohistorization; Bernfeld, Siegfried; Construction de l 'espace analytique (La- ) [Constructing the analytic space]; Family romance; "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Wolf Man); Historical truth; Historical reality; Intergenerational; Interpretation; Lifting of amnesia; Memories; Memory.