ABSTRACT
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud abandons his aim of instilling meaning into symptoms, thus heralding a second period in psychoanalytic technique, one in which construction prevails over interpretation. In 1937, in his major article on constructions, he accounted for the activity of the analyst, he once again used his customary metaphor of archaeology. This time, however, his intention was to accentuate the difference between patient and analyst. The consequence of inviting the analyst to form his own personal "delusion" incites Freud not only to lose sight of the insistence of the real, but to subordinate his constructions entirely to a search for a fragment of lost reality. A construction is an auxiliary element that compensates for the absence of a real. In reality, there is never any genuine confirmation of the analyst's constructions, only effects that resembles dream hallucination or that triggers a sense of reality. Freud, however, never confuses truth with reality.
