Likening psychoanalysis to archaeology Freud maintains that adult dreams, fantasies and neurotic symptoms are psychic artifacts of infantile history. Using these artifacts he constructs the theory of infantile sexuality by moving backward, transforming observations made in the present into causes which he situates in the infantile past. A detailed analysis of 'From the History of an Infantile Neurosis' shows that when Freud cannot convincingly reconstruct an actual infantile event he then takes another step back and constructs a supposedly real phylogenetic event. For Freud such events are both bedrock and first causes; in fact they are the culmination of psychoanalytic speculation.