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It is perhaps too extreme to define the role of the analyst by insisting that he is not to recollect anything—that is the patient's role. But in reconstructing the amnesic memory of an analysand, does the analyst not have as a field in which to work his own memory of past analyses as well as the present analytic work in progress? The analyst recalls in order to elaborate that which is enacted and reenacted, tirelessly, in the analysis. Does he not use, for the virtual space of his work of construction, the effects of his memory of the analytic work? And does he not legitimately use his knowledge of the patient's reports of his previous analytic work?
In this perspective, what is the function of clinical texts that set up the plot of several sessions around a transference act, an incidental thought, a disruptive affect, snippets of memories? A clinical narrative amounts to a construction in analysis. The reading and rereading, writing and rewriting, carried out in order to arrive at an account of the analytic work, are the same as a construction. This work discovers and constitutes potential passages between the two players through the intermediary of the analyst's memory of the analytic past and the different contexts of sessions in which associative activity is interrupted at the same point.