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Dynamic processes in the recovery of memories are discussed having regard to technical innovations which followed the study of defence mechanisms (1936). The interrelation of reconstruction and effective therapy is more complex than was assumed in Freud's earliest theories. Reconstructive work may shelter relevant conflicts where biographical connexions are isolated from affect or otherwise hidden. On the other hand, detailed analysis of current conflict situations may highlight a hidden identity between past and present and open the way for genetic interpretation. The latter may point to archaic impulses representing preverbal ideations embedded in later experiences or establish an historical context linking the isolated elements in the patient's material, according as stress is laid on the endopsychic or environmental factors.
Problems in the reconstruction of archaic material are illustrated from specific cases; the danger of the patient getting control of an empty id vernacular to be used as resistance; the pre-essential lifting of anticathexis against derivatives spread over wide areas of behaviour; the distinguishing of repeated (strain) traumata from single (shock) events, as yet hardly understood; the fact that reconstruction is regularly concerned with thoughts and feelings which did not necessarily exist at the time of the 'the event', but which derive from the interaction of the infantile experience with later events. The recovery of childhood memories is part of the struggle between the ego and the id and also of a rearguard struggle which takes place within the ego itself. The latter reflects in some way the functional distribution of various defences in each personality, particularly the interaction between repression and more archaic methods, which in some personalities still remain central for the solution of conflict. In psychotic and transitional states the dysfunction of both sets of mechanisms sometimes leads to unusual memory phenomena. T