Photographs, Reconstructions, and the Psychoanalytic Task: A Clinical Note

Not long ago, during the same week, two analytic patients brought to their hours photographs they wanted me to see. This fortuitous occurrence raised questions in my mind about how often this happens and about the implications of this phenomenon. I was reminded that over the years I have seen a good many photographs brought in by patients; unfortunately I have not kept a record of this and can only guess in a most approximate way how often this happened. Perhaps as many as one-fifth of the patients I have seen in psychoanalysis or intensive psychotherapy have brought in photos—short-term psychotherapy is another matter, as I will discuss later.

I was also reminded that I had never seen an article in the psychoanalytic literature that dealt with this issue; this impression was confirmed by a literature search. There were several articles (Anderson and Malloy, 1976; Entin, 1981, 1982; Wessels, 1985) on the value of photographs in the context of family therapy — here the therapist encourages bringing in family photographs and actively participates in exploring their meaning. There were also two brief reports (Coblentz, 1964; Graham, 1967) on the use of photographs as part of the evaluation process in a public clinic. In one of these (Graham, 1967) the therapist served additionally as photographer and took a Polaroid snapshot of the patient at the end of each evaluation and therapy session; the photos were