Reconstruction in a Two-Person World May Be More about the Present than the Past: Freud and the Wolf Man, an Illustration

The psychoanalytic process of reconstruction has yet to be examined from the perspective of today's two-person psychologies. Earlier writers on the subject have implicated the analyst and his emotional involvement as influences that may distort the valid recovery of memories, while others have written that the transference and the reconstructed past are interdependent. By contrast with both views, it is suggested here that the reconstructed product itself may reflect the transference-countertransference engagement of the dyad: in some instances, and to some extent in all instances, the scene or story of the presumed past will be a version of the current analytic relationship. In certain cases consideration of the conscious and unconscious emotional entanglements of the dyad will reveal that the reconstruction says more about the analytic present than about the past. Freud's Wolf Man case provides a good illustration of this point. While a broad consensus exists that its famous primal scene reconstruction cannot be veridical, it has most often been dismissed as distorted by Freud's theoretical commitments. A closer examination of the relationship between Freud and Pankejeff reveals that the reconstruction is an accurate rendering of warded-off aspects of the dyad's way of being together. The potential clinical utility of adopting this perspective is that it encourages the analyst to reflect on his clinical reconstructions, interrogating them for clues to otherwise elusive aspects of the current clinical relationship.