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It is my pleasure to be part of this forum in memory of Richard Gottlieb. I am fortunate to have known him as both teacher and mentor. I was always impressed by Richard's erudition and enthusiasm about all things psychoanalytic; but most of all, I remember his kind, inquisitive, and curious manner with me and with others.
And so it is fitting that with his paper on reconstruction and with this panel, Richard has opened a door for us to become curious again, not just about reconstruction, but about the very core of psychoanalysis: the mechanism of its therapeutic action.
I want to thank Leon Hoffman for putting this panel together and also to thank our panelists: Harold Blum, Donnel Stern, and Richard Lane. We are fortunate to have this esteemed group share with us a wide range of ideas about reconstruction and therapeutic change.
In fact, it is apparently hard to speak of reconstruction without talking about therapeutic action. We can see this reflected in Gottlieb's last paper (2017), as well as in our panelists, each of whom has spoken as much about the mutative process in psychoanalysis as of reconstructing the past. I think this is in part because Freud tied historical reconstruction to the curative process of psychoanalysis. But perhaps even more influential is the fact that reconstruction involves memory, emotion, and experience, three elements we hear a lot about in these papers and that play a critical role in most any model of therapeutic action.
On my first reading of our panelists’ contributions, these works seemed somewhat at odds, but as I digested them I found the ideas to be ultimately consistent, even complementary. It helps to appreciate that reconstruction, like many terms in psychoanalysis, has a multitude of close meanings and uses, and that these have evolved to some degree over