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The genetic approach—the reconstruction of past experience and of its influence on the present—is a basic feature of the theory and practice of psychoanalytic therapy. The aims and methods involved, however, have changed throughout the years. Originally the intention was to recapture specific forgotten memories that were traumatically embedded in the unconscious. By making these accessible to consciousness, the mind was to be purged of disturbing elements that produced symptoms.
At present, we understand that a complicated character formation has intervened between the forgotten episodes of early childhood and the contemporary disturbances. The total personality, not isolated incidents, must be visualized in a context of total experience as the research into the past is pushed. The technique by which this is accomplished is psychoanalysis itself.
The investigation of the past goes hand in hand, in analysis, with the study of immediate events in the life of the patient. It is through its effect upon the present that the influence of the past is felt. It is through the pressure of the present that the memories of the past are set in action. The analyst must therefore keep his attention constantly focused on a screen against which are projected two sets of images—from the past and from the present. His task requires that he concentrate neither on one nor on the other alone, but rather on the relation between them. The normal individual spontaneously fuses the past and present images that are operative within himself; the neurotic blurs and interchanges them.
The work of genetic reconstruction ranges, therefore, from