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Viderman's apparent denial of the validity and truth value of constructions in analysis is criticized by Chasseguet-Smirgel. Viderman's thesis raises questions for the scientific status of psychoanalysis and leaves little to distinguish the analyst's work from suggestion. Viderman undermines psychoanalysis as an instrument of knowledge. If he is correct, then psychoanalysis becomes a sort of Berkeleyan idealism, in which everything is in the mind of the analyst, while the existence of the reconstructed past becomes problematic. The aim of psychoanalysis is knowledge, and this aim is inconsistent with Viderman's thesis. Viderman would make psychoanalytic theory itself a "construction" on Freud's part. Chasseguet-Smirgel stresses a point also mentioned by Pasche: that the analytic contract is triangular, in that it is not just between the patient and the analyst, but involves submission of both parties to the basic rule. This represents submission to an external law, involving both the superego and external reality. Hence psychoanalysis pursues the actual historical past, and not a fiction about the past.