On Reconstruction

MY PRIMARY AIM IN THIS PAPER is to discuss the functions and significance of reconstruction in our psychoanalytic work. I shall attempt to describe the process of reconstruction in the course of psychoanalytic therapy, the principles of its methodology rather than details of technique, something of the process that takes place in the work of reconstruction, and to give some brief clinical illustrations. I will then present my ideas regarding the contribution that careful reconstructive work can make to individual therapy as well as to clinical research, which in turn may gradually influence and expand our psychoanalytic theory. It is especially helpful in bringing to light the impact of disturbances in infancy on later oedipal and postoedipal developments.

The idea of reconstruction seems to me a fundamental one in the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. The terms construction and reconstruction are familiar to most analysts. They appear in the current literature with less frequency, however, than they did 37 years ago, when Freud's article on "Constructions in Analysis" was published (1937). Even then Freud noted that the term "reconstruction" seemed often to be replaced inaccurately by "interpretation." Certainly the two words have different connotations. Freud had adopted the terms construction and reconstruction from an analogy between the work done in analytic therapy and that undertaken