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This paper has three starting points. The first is the work of Pentti lkonen and Eero Rechardt on constructions which was presented at the Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress in Oslo in the summer of 1990 (Ikonen & Rechardt, 1991). The second is the work of Paul Ricoeur in the early 1970: those of his texts which begin to deal with poetics, and particularly the book on metaphor, “La métaphore vive” (1975). The third starting point is a frequently recurring theme in the essays of Mikael Enckell (e.g., Enckell, 1962, 1988): the idea that–as Oscar Wilde puts it in the dialogue “The Decay of Lying”–art does not imitate reality, reality imitates art.
However, I am not going to deal with the writings I have referred to in any detail; the starting points are mainly to be seen as personal sources of inspiration. A fourth text–which made these sources topical–will, on the other hand, often recur in the following text. A reading of this text gave birth to the idea that a construction might formally be considered a metaphor, with the resulting question: what could such a comparison contain.
Ikonen and Rechardt refer to a case report presented at the Rome Congress in 1989, which has also been published with the title “Repetition and Surprise” (Faimberg & Corel, 1990). The clinical material is from an analysis which has come to a stalemate.
During the first years of analysis, Jacques has begun to live a more satisfactory life than he did earlier on; he has set up a family of his own and also taken up his writing again. However, during the fourth year, he begins to suffer from attacks of catastrophic anxiety during the sessions, attacks which are void of ideas or images but which recur on a regular