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Guillaumin agrees with two main points that Viderman presents. The first is that the analyst plays an essential role in the analysis through the ordering effect of words used in working out a construction. The second point of agreement
is that the construction never leads to an integral reconstitution that is objectively faithful to what "really happened." For Guillaumin, these points of view are profoundly Freudian and accord with his own clinical experiences. Every analytic discourse has the question of reality in the background, but constructions raise the question of the historical past in a particularly acute way. Freud's 1937 paper "Constructions in Analysis" introduced an important ambiguity in Freud's attitude toward the reality of the recovered memories of his patients. For a while Freud had seemed to be immersed in a methodological skepticism concerning the reality of the recovered past memories, while the important therapeutic aspect of constructions was viewed as resulting from the coherence introduced into the personal psychic history. With the 1937 paper the question of the reality of memory is taken up again in depth, seemingly with a return to the objective realism of some of Freud's earlier views.
Analysts have been divided into two camps by this article. One group holds that the vocabulary of the 1937 paper is largely metaphorical, and hence that constructions are largely subjective elaborations about historical reality. Their functional value is that which is really important for the patient. Other analysts, however, hold that constructions attempt to attain the objective reality of the history of the patient as it actually happened. Guillaumin will join neither camp. He suggests rather that both Freud and Viderman are attempting to acknowledge the intensely subjective character of psychical experience while at the same time taking into account the unalterable nature of reality of the events which play a role in the structuralization