ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes Sigmund Freud’s views on reconstruction, and explores the differential meanings of reconstruction and construction. It describes the shifting emphasis, and frame the decline in the use of reconstruction as a pivotal psychoanalytic technique within the context of the critiques levelled against it. The chapter considers the contemporary re-evaluation of reconstruction in the light of fresh perspectives on it. In his seminal text, “Constructions in analysis”, Freud manifestly used the terms construction and reconstruction interchangeably. It would seem that his focus was to convey how central to psychoanalytic technique it was to lift repression so as to get a coherent picture of the patient’s “forgotten years”. In discussing comparative technical uses of transference and reconstruction, it is important to note that the notion of transference itself is complex. The original idea of transference, as formulated by Freud, rested on the essential ingredient of transfer.
