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ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGISTS in London have in recent years increased their interest in reconstruction as an effective tool in reductive analysis. Frieda Fordham (1964) and Michael Fordham (1966) have made a number of theoretical and clinical references to its use in the treatment of regressed and other patients. In the London Society of Analytical Psychology it has been discussed in recent meetings between the training analysts and the Professional Committee, and in 1967 it became a main topic in the series of first year training seminars.
Nevertheless the use of the word is infrequent and it needs searching for in the literature. Freud used the word construction, and sometimes reconstruction, in his essay on the Rat Man (1909), and specifically reconstruction in a late essay on technique (1937). Here Freud compares the analyst's work with that of the archeologist in terms of their resemblance, since
‘both have an undisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains. Both of them, moreover, are subject to many of the same difficulties and sources of error. The analyst works under more favourable conditions than the archeologist since he has at his disposal material which can have no counterpart in excavations, such as the repetition of reactions dating from infancy and all that emerges in connexion with these repetitions through the transference’ (1937, p. 259).
It is also in connection with these passages that Klein affirms ‘the right —indeed the necessity—to reconstruct from the material presented to us by our patients’ detail and data about earlier stages’ (1957, p. 1).
Rubinfine (1967) elaborates on the use of the couch in promoting feeling states in the patient which facilitate the work of reconstruction, and discusses a theory of memory which throws light on the way in which a