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This issue of psychoanalytic inquiry brings together an outstanding group of contributors on a topic that seems to have been neglected until recently. Greenacre's “On Reconstruction” (1975) may have re-introduced the subject to psychoanalytic consideration. From 1976 through 1980 the American Psychoanalytic Association held discussion groups on “Reconstruction and Unconscious Fantasy in Psychoanalytic Treatment,” and a Panel (1982) on “Construction and Reconstruction” was held in 1980.
Perhaps the renewed interest in reconstruction has to do with the increased interest in the developmental point of view and the object relations school, which have emphasized early, preoedipal experiences. Psychoanalytic self psychology also gives significance to early preoedipal experiences, and this leads in the direction of reconstruction.
The topic of reconstruction lends itself to the current controversy in psychoanalysis of natural science versus hermeneutics. This has been restated in other ways as causality versus meaning, “truth” and facts versus subjective experience, and finally, metapsychology versus psychology.
Merton Gill recently (1983) referred to the natural-science model in psychoanalysis as the metapsychological paradigm, which he