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Psychoanalysis has been bashed for many reasons, but a particularly prominent complaint refers to its postdictive methodology. That is, we are loath to make future predictions for an individual; rather, we aim to provide a post hoc account of what most likely happened in the past or, more accurately, the reconstruction of an individual's experience of the past. The criticism is that a methodology that can readily account for any outcome whatever is too pliable. If it accounts for everything, it ultimately accounts for nothing.
In recent decades the traditional view of transference and the value of reconstruction has been challenged by psychoanalysts themselves. The challenge includes both the reinterpretation of transference as a here-and-now phenomenon rather than a there-and-then construction, a view championed by Kleinians and others, and the notion that there is no there-and-then to reconstruct via transference phenomena, that transference is co-created de novo in each analytic dyad, an account held by many relational theorists. On both views, the role of reconstruction has been challenged, minimized, or even eliminated.
Richard Gottlieb's posthumously published paper (2017) attempts to demonstrate that Freud's reconstruction of the Wolf Man's infantile history reflects the transference-countertransference entanglement in their ongoing analytic work. In this respect, his essay challenges the false dichotomy between the there-and-then (genetic reconstruction) and the here-and-now transference-countertransference fantasy enactments in the analytic dyad. Given the ubiquity of transference, it is inevitable that the provenance of here-and-now transference fantasies and enactments will be found in historical, there-and-then traumatic events. It is a technical decision to choose to interpret the former over the latter, at least in the opening phases of an analysis, as a corrective to intellectualization's being favored over one's in vivo experience in the transference.