ABSTRACT
This chapter explores S. Freud's notion of construction. It focuses on any traces of it in J. Lacan's teaching. While for Freud construction aims at the real, for Lacan the real cannot be accessed in the same way. There is nothing more evidently problematic than the Freudian method of construction. Claiming to be able to rediscover an individual's "historical truth", Freud broadened this notion further through the analogy with the history of religions in Moses and Monotheism. According to a note made by Strachey, reported by Yerushalmi, the distinction between "material" truth and "historical" truth appeared fairly late in Freud's work, relative to religion, in the 1935 Postscript to his autobiography. In 1937, in "Constructions", Freud used the expression again, this time in relation to delusion. The fact that "good" constructions sometimes bring up fragments of memory that are connected, in a form that is quasi-hallucinatory, led him to question the relation between delusion and truth.
