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This issue of the Revue is a further installment in the lively, sometimes heated discussions that have occurred in the French psychoanalytic literature on the construction of unremembered events during psychoanalytic treatment. Our focus will be on the two main reports in this volume.
The first of these is by the psychosomaticien Jacques Press, who examines Freud's writings on constructions, connecting them with the work of Winnicott and Ferenczi on trauma, and extending the notion of trauma, memory traces, and constructions to the treatment of psychosomatic patients. The second is by Michèle Bertrand, who gives another, differing, and equally excellent discussion of Freud's writings leading to the introduction of the notion of constructions, as well as a thoroughgoing discussion and critique of the more recent conceptions of construction: those of Serge Viderman in France, and the views of Roy Schafer and Donald Spence.
Both articles are so rich in observations and so tightly argued as well that abstraction has been a difficult, even an impossible challenge. Therefore, these two major reports are presented here in some detail, and often the arguments are presented en bloc.
Both authors feel that the continuing interest in the problem on both sides of the Atlantic shows we still have a need for conceptual tools to understand it. The renewal of discussion about these notions and the questions raised on their meaning or their justification is in direct relation with the renewal of a theoretical-clinical debate on constructions. The very nature of the analytic process, the conception of time in treatment, the conditions of the analytic frame, and the possibility of symbolization that it opens are the principal themes of the controversy.