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George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and Shakespeare stated that “what's past is prologue.” Freud envisioned the analyst as archaeologist and psychoanalysis as akin to an archaeological dig, an unpeeling of hidden layers of the past. In Freud's office there was a picture
of an Egyptian temple, Abu Simbel, and countless antique sculptures. The Wolf Man remarked that Freud's office was more an archaeologist's study than that of a doctor, and Freud boasted to Stefan Zweig that he had read more archaeology than psychology.
The archaeological metaphor is, of course, all part of the history and perhaps myth of psychoanalysis. Today there is the analysis of the transference in the here-and-now, analysis as a two-person psychology, and debates over historical truth at a time when narratives and story lines have captured analysts' interest and imagination.
My comments about recent trends are not made to diminish them and whatever usefulness they may provide. Surely anyone who has read Bion's advice to listen “without memory or desire,” without prior judgment in an open-minded way, or Theodor Reik's suggestion that we allow ourselves to be surprised have certainly benefited from the immediacy of the present in the analytic transaction.
Harold Blum's new book is a useful reminder of the role of reconstruction and of an earlier time in psychoanalysis, but also as an important testament to the mutative value of reconstruction and lifting memories from a dark past. While his contribution is surely an antidote to the zeitgeist, one wishes that it might have been less repetitive, perhaps a bit less dogmatic in style, and with clearer and more informative clinical examples. It reads like a book written by a committee and, indeed, it might be characterized as that since it is the product of the work of a committee.
The volume is the result of the efforts of a research group under the auspices of the Psychoanalytic Research and Deve