Chapter 3: Deconstruction and Reconstruction: A Self-Psychological Perspective on the Construction of Meaning in Psychoanalysis

The authors present and elaborate their thesis that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic science concerned with the causal nature of meaning. They contend that psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with uncovering the meaning of experience as unconsciously determined, that is, caused, by fantasy and as revealed by symptomatic effects. The cause-and-effect interrelationship that exists among fantasy, meaning, and symptom derives from certain abnormal experiences of self relative to selfobject that occur during early development. The authors draw upon their clinical studies of patients diagnosed with panic disorder, OCD, and OCPD and present two clinical vignettes for illustrative purposes. Using a combined method of “analytic deconstruction” and reconstruction, the authors demon-Maria T. Miliora, PhD, MSW, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice and Professor at Suffolk University, Boston, MA. Richard B. Ulman, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and Croton-on-Hudson, NY, and a senior faculty member of the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology.

slrate how various psychopathological states are reflective of failures to transform archaic narcissistic fantasies that unconsciously determine the meaning of the symptoms suffered by those diagnosed with these specific self-disorders.