ABSTRACT
Looking more closely at the process of reconstruction, the traces or fragments provided by the patient and with which the analyst works appear in various forms. Freud listed them succinctly as appearing in dreams, in allusions contained in the patient's associations, and in the patient's actions inside and outside the analytic situation. Freud further distinguished between the interventions of interpretation and of construction, or reconstruction. Interpretations deal with single elements or aspects of the patient's unconscious psychic life and have the aim of making them fully conscious so as to be better understood. The intense repression to which sexual wishes had been subjected was evident in his description of his forcing himself to masturbate at the age of fifteen, "to find out what it was like," allegedly never having done it before. A great deal of clinical material is required to provide sufficient background for the demonstration of a reconstruction.
