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IN HIS PAPER "CONSTRUCTIONS IN ANALYSIS" (1937), INTERESTINGLY enough published in the same year as "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Freud describes the work of analysis as a search for a "trustworthy and in all essential respects complete picture
of the patient's forgotten years." The work of analysis consists of "two quite different portions" and "involves two people, to each of whom a distinct task is assigned… the person who is being analysed has to be induced to remember something that has been experienced by him and repressed; and the dynamic determinants of the process are so interesting that the other portion of the work, the task performed by the analyst, has been pushed into the background… His task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it. The time and manner in which he conveys his constructions to the person who is being analysed … constitute the link between the two portions of the work of analysis, between his own part and that of the patient" (p. 258f.).
Thus Freud used the term "construction" or "reconstruction" in two senses, namely, reconstruction as a process in t