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Freud generates some disconcerting analogies in his commentary on the nature of psychoanalytic interpretation entitled “Constructions in Analysis.” He suggests that the delusions of patients are like interpretations in psychoanalysis and that, like delusions, interpretations may be found to contain “fragments” of “historical truth”:
I have not been able to resist the seduction of an analogy. The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment—attempts at explanation and cure, though it is true that these, under the conditions of a psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had already been disavowed in the remote past [1937, p. 268].