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In the paper which Freud wrote in 1937, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937d), he spoke about the importance of what he called construction. He had often written about construction before, but he gathered it all together in that paper and stated openly that he felt it was more important to give interpretations which are really constructions than to give particular interpretations. There is still a great deal of danger about the use of terms like ‘omnipotence’. There are patients who say, “I don't know what you mean when you say ‘omnipotence’”. This seems, at first, an unrealistic, or even hostile comment, but in fact it deserves to have considerable attention paid to it. In analysis patients who are feeling helpless are also feeling omnipotent. Conversely, if they are feeling omnipotent they are also feeling helpless – the two are, in reality, not separated. Words like ‘omnipotence’ are very compressed statements which have a considerable penumbra of associations. In so far as omnipotence is associated with ideas belonging to some kind of religious belief, it is important to know which religious belief.
If we read a poem like Paradise Lost, or an aesthetic statement or poem like the Aeneid, or the Odyssey, or the Iliad, we tend to think that we are reading, or being taught, English, or Latin, or Greek literature. When those aesthetic constructions were made they were not literature. Paradise Lost was a serious attempt to make a religious statement; it was the simplest and easiest way in which Milton could convey what he considered to be great religious truth – it was a great poem incidentally. Similarly, when Virgil wrote the Aeneid he was not trying to write good Latin, or good literature. He was saying what he had to say. Consequently we tend to forget, and even our teachers tend to forget, that what is important is what the writer was trying to
convey; those particular poems endure because they retain a capacity for having a meaning. The stupendous nature of the I