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In a posthumously published essay, Richard Gottlieb (2017) suggests that much of Freud's reconstruction of the Wolf Man's infantile history reflects specific transference-countertransference engagements occurring during treatment. The reconstructed past is shown to reveal much about warded-off aspects of the analytic present. I will use Gottlieb's ideas in examining the reconstruction presented in Newell Fischer's “A Note on the Indelible.” I offer these thoughts not as a better, more “exact” interpretation of M.H.'s dream but instead as an example of the clinical richness that can emerge when Gottlieb's work is taken into account. In my speculations about the relationship between particular forms of clinical engagement and reconstruction, I hope that some incongruities in the dream narrative and clinical processes provided in “A Note on the Indelible” will yield intriguing questions that can allow a deeper appreciation of both this dream and the treatment.
M.H., an eighty-year-old retired mental health professional, is described as a “handsome gray-haired gentleman … [who] was articulate, thoughtful, and psychologically sophisticated” (p. 94). We are told he was happily married, in good health, financially comfortable, on good terms with his wife, children, and grandchildren, and enjoying retirement by fulfilling his lifelong wish to travel and explore new places. Although several of his close relatives had died in their early seventies, his only stated concern about his health was that he might become “immobilized by various arthritic ailments” (p. 95). M.H. had undergone psychoanalysis several decades earlier and found it “helpful and rewarding” (p. 94).