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Richard Gottlieb was a clinician, scholar, teacher, and close personal friend. Since academic and intellectual discourse was such a central part of Richard's life and of his relationships with colleagues and friends, it is fitting that we remember him with this panel and these papers that build on his final academic contribution, “Reconstruction in a Two-Person World May Be More about the Present Than the Past: Freud and the Wolf Man, an Illustration” (Gottlieb 2017).1
In that paper he notes that the psychoanalytic process of reconstruction has not been reexamined from the perspective of today's two-person formulations. He notes too that previous observers 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, Gottlieb stresses the important influence of the present on memories of the past.
The contribution of this paper is that the recovery of some presumed past event in the patient's life may reflect a version of the current analytic relationship. In other words, the reconstruction may say more about the analytic present than about the patient's historical past. Gottlieb analyzes