Reconstruction in the Present Two-Person Psychoanalysis: The Wolf Man Case Reconstructed

We practice in an era of psychoanalytic diversity, occasioning concerns about confusion and diffusion, but also reevaluation and creative change. New ideas regarding the two-person analytic process, preoedipal development, self- and object relations, narcissism, and inquiry into analytic outcome have influenced the ongoing evolution of psychoanalytic thought. Transference and countertransference are now understood as complex compromise formations with interpersonal/intersubjective as well as traditional intrapsychic determinants (Racker 1968). The techniques of genetic interpretation and reconstruction were influenced from outside traditional/classical psychoanalysis by the concept of the analyst as “participant observer” (Sullivan 1953) and from within traditional analysis by Loewald (1960) and others who considered the analyst a real and new object. Transference and countertransference may to a degree be co-created compromise formations. However, there are limits to dyadic co-creation, in my opinion, since each person brings to treatment a unique personality that is not entirely malleable. Adult character, in particular, is relatively stable, enduring, and resistant to change (Baudry 1989). Although technical approaches to genetic interpretation and reconstruction have been modified over time, both remain important to clinical work and analytic theory. Even if the analyst does not engage in explicit reconstruction, it is an implicit aspect of the traditional analyst's clinical work. Reconstruction is prominent in Freud's case of the Wolf Man , reported in 1918, and figures in all his case histories, his applied analytic papers, and his 1937 paper devoted