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We shall attempt to ascertain the conditions under which construction in psychoanalysis may be considered valid, i. e. those conditions that ensure that the construction truly corresponds to conflicts in the patient's own psyche and is not a theory ‘constructed’by the analyst and inserted from outside the movement of the transference. We shall also try to demonstrate, using a clinical example, the importance of construction as a means of helping the patient to overcome an ‘impasse’ situation in his analysis.
The main hypothesis we shall develop is that the concept of construction, in its very structure, implies a very fertile paradox: Being by definition retroactive, it is at the same time anticipatory, in the sense that it establishes a precondition for access to psychical truths. We refer to the concept of Nachträglichkeit, translated by Strachey in the Standard Edition as ‘deferred action’ and in French as après-coup. For our purpose, we shall not draw a sharp distinction between reconstruction and construction. We shall thus be following Freud's usage, according to which the two terms are interchangeable, and we shall try to develop what in our view is a fruitful ambiguity between the two terms. We shall not comment on the extensive bibliography on this subject; let us only recall a few of the more recent contributions.