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This thin volume, a definitive appraisal of reconstruction in psychoanalysis, allows the author to consider more generally the roles historicity and historiography play in classical analytic theory and practice.
Since psychoanalysis, according to McGuire, aims at more than a cure, since it purports to make a comprehensive statement about human development, the analyst must have sufficient discriminative powers to determine the analysand's veridical past. The analyst who aims primarily at uncovering significant psychogenetic material to effect a cure is, however, caught in a peculiar bind. Resistances disturbing accurate anamnesis are only overcome by attuning oneself to the unconscious, and this very process makes it highly probable that important material relating to the past will bear the imprint of an agency (the id) which is not necessarily governed by the laws of reality. The attempted resolution of this paradox constitutes the nucleus of McGuire's book.
After marshaling arguments within and outside the field of psychoanalysis which claim that reconstruction is an impossibility, in the last third of his impressive monograph McGuire offers a cogent systematic explanation of the intuitive approach which enables the psychoanalyst to succeed. The degree of flux, plausibility, internal consistency, representativeness, redundancy, and probabilistic representation of features of the patient's emotional and physical environment relevant to psychoanalytic experience and theory are cited as general rules and guidelines for the evaluation of the authenticity of psychiatric data. Although McGuire gives the negative arguments more space than the positive ones, he feels reconstruction is possible.
The classical psychoanalyst in McGuire is a part of an admirable psychoanalytic tradition. He is above all else an intellectual sophisticate. Because of this McGuire speaks humbly about one's ability to truly know the past. If a belief in the ultimate primacy of reason reflected in th