How Does History Become Accessible? Reconstruction as an Emergent Product of the Interpersonal Field

I am honored to be part of this panel created in the memory of Richard Gottlieb. Given the panel's purpose, I had to decide how to approach his contribution to it . The best way, it seemed to me, is to react to the paper just as I would if he were living. I will be straightforward in disagreeing with Gottlieb when that's how I feel, and I will be using the paper, and the topic of historical reconstruction in general, as a springboard for my own perspective on the subject.

I was surprised to read the first sentence of Gottlieb's abtract: “The psychoanalytic process of reconstruction has yet to be reexamined from the perspective of today's two-person psychologies.” This statement certainly does not square with my reading of the literature. Gottlieb himself cites Edgar Levenson's work, in which the story of the patient's life that comes into being in the treatment is understood to be shaped in part by the analytic relatedness, especially its unconscious aspects—just as the relatedness, of course, is significantly shaped by the history. But Levenson is hardly alone. As far as I know, every writer whose theoretical orientation can be described as interpersonal, relational, or intersubjective has taken a view of this general variety, frequently described as constructivist or