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In Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis, Harold P. Blum undertakes a comprehensive historical and clinical overview of his subject: the use of reconstruction as a therapeutic tool. It is a subject that the author describes with deep knowledge and argues for with passion tempered by fairness. Noting that reconstruction has fallen out of favor, Blum charts the ups and downs of its popularity, as methods and focal points of psychoanalysis have changed over the years. Particularly interesting in this regard in Blum's discussion of the relationship between the use of reconstruction and the use of transference as the primary means for analysis, a relationship that, in the end, the author finds to be reciprocal rather than adversarial.
Blum speaks on his subject with rare clarity and insight; his explications are succinct, elegant, and accessible. For example, he states that reconstruction is “an explanatory proposition: at a particular time and developmental phase this and that must have happened, and you must have reacted in this way, and that is why you now, under these conditions and circumstances, react in this way and with that consequence.” Thus reconstruction “refers both to real experience and to the history and evolution of interrelated fantasy” (both quotes p. 161). Having established in the reader's mind the parameters of the definition of reconstruction as well as its place in the historical continuum of psychoanalysis, Blum goes on to present a number of intriguing clinical cases that demonstrate the unique and profitable ways in which reconstruction can be used in the therapy session. The case studies effectively bolster his main point: “Reconstruction makes a decisive difference in clinical analysis…. The past within the present is transformed forging a new vision of reality” (p. 150). Indeed, these cases, with their varied histories and outcomes, give great credence to the book's final statement, which upholds that “reconstruction is an essential dimension of p