Reading Freud’s “Constructions in Analysis” (1938)
Freud opened up his essay by referring to a well-known man of science — he neglects to mention his name, and this cannot be by chance — whose favourable opinion of psychoanalysis nonetheless brought him to make an accusation of charlatanism among its practitioners: ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’ In other words, we have here a version of the claim that psychoanalysis is not a science because its interpretations cannot be falsified. The claim is that an interpretation is correct if the patient agrees with it but if the patient does not agree with it then it is taken as a sign of the ego’s resistance. In both cases, the analyst, as interpreter, is correct and there is no space against which the analyst can be proven to be incorrect in his interpretation.
Freud’s initial response to this is not to respond directly with the accusation but rather to further complicate the original question. Instead of suggesting that the analyst is either correct or incorrect Freud opens up further difficulties already within the domain of the patient who acts within this hypothetical as the litmus test of epistemological validity. It is not that the analyst is always correct but rather that the question is typically the wrong one, and this is what Freud seemed to go out of his way to prove. First, the ‘no’ of the patient, his or her rejection of an interpretation, is not a sufficient basis upon which to reject an interpretation since it may very well be a sign of resistance. Yet, the goal is not to assent to the litmus test of validity by way of the patient’s ego. Both the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ are responses that come the place of the ego and hence do not at all engage with the darker and more mysterious aspects of the psyche.
Freud proceeded to discuss the work of analysis. The patient attempts to remember, that is, to bring to mind, experiences and impulses which have been forgotten or replaced. He therefore introduces fragments which occur in distorted, pathological, and symptomatic ways. We can find in these memories certain repetitions that are a part of the repressed material. It is with thanks to the transference that is established with the psychoanalyst that these repressed fragments can emerge again. And these fragments are the ‘stuff’ from which — the ‘raw materials’ from which — something may be constructed.
Freud discussed two functions: the work of the patient and the work of the analyst. The patient has as his or her function to remember that which has been repressed. During this process the analyst is really brought into the background. This is what Freud says — the analyst disappears when the fragments are brought to the fore through the work of the analyst: “this process [is] so interesting that the other portion of the work, the task performed by the analyst, has been pushed into the background.” It is obvious that the analyst has as his function not to remember, that is, not to dig up the repressed. This is important because there are those Freudians who claim that the analyst should also do the work of rooting out his unconscious repressed material within the analyst setting, as if it would clear the air. Freud explicitly does not suggest this, but rather he suggests the complete opposite. The analyst must be made to disappear while this work is being done.
The analyst after all of that has as his or her task to take “the traces” — this are all rejected ‘bits,’ garbage heaps, and so on — of material and to construct something out of it. Freud is clear that this must be done in its correct time. Thus, there is something important to be said about when this work is conducted by the analyst. But these are two fundamental moments in the work. Freud writes: “[these] constitute the link between the two portions of the work of analysis, between his own part and that of the patient.” Next, if it is a matter of construction then it is again not necessarily an agency of the analyst since Freud is careful to qualify ‘construction’ with the word ‘reconstruction,’ likening it again to one of his favoured analogies, that of archaeological excavation.
In other words, Freud defends the analysts claim on always being correct. He defends himself from the very beginning from the claim that falsifiability is the measure of a science or of psychoanalysis. The analyst cannot be treated as an ego, that is, as a consistency of knowledge which must be evaluated, because his function is rather to reconstruct what the patient has already built up over his or her lifetime. Yet, there is something of an agency introduced, fleeting, when Freud continues his analogy:
“it must be borne in mind that the excavator is dealing with destroyed objects of which large and important portions have quite certainly been lost, by mechanical violence, by fire and by plundering. No amount of effort can result in their discovery and lead to their being united with the surviving remains. The one and only course open is that of reconstruction, which for this reason can often reach only a certain degree of probability.” Does Freud not unintentionally open up a space of the ‘navel of the dream’ in this passage? Here he introduces something that cannot be recovered but which nonetheless once existed — but what about something that cannot be recovered because it was never there? That is, what about a piece of architecture that never had a solid foundation? This is the path upon which Freud does not dwell but upon which Lacan would later help us navigate.
The second section of the text from Freud explores the ‘side by side’ aspect of construction. He admits that in truth these constructions are happening more in tandem than in a strict and long drawn out double series of succession. When the analyst completes one construct he gives it back to the patient and then a communication occurs as a consequence. And then new material is developed and a fresh construction is developed and communicated again. Freud writes that this continues “until the end,” although, to be sure, it is unclear what is meant in this context of the end. It is here that Freud finally makes his distinction between interpretation and construction:
“Interpretation applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a construction when one laws before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten.”
In other words, an interpretation is work conducted at the low-level of the fragment itself. If the fragments are dream related then it might be an interpretation of the fragments displacement or condensation. But construction is when a larger narrative is built upon the basis of these interpretations. Interpretation is therefore one of drawing attention to the fragment in its isolation. In the final instance, it is to draw attention to the fact of the unconscious. However, construction is to work through the unconscious and to produce a revelation or an awakening. This is how I would read Freud at this moment of the text.
Freud is not concerned with the ‘correctness’ of an interpretation or a construction. The reason for this is because he seems to have the intuition that judgments from this domain are restricted to a particular type of response that does not take into account the logic of the unconscious. He does not welcome ‘incorrect constructions’ but nonetheless claims that they probably do no harm: “no damage is done if, for once in a way, we make a mistake and offer the patient a wrong construction as the probably historical truth.” Why? It is because Freud is interested in the function of the analyst rather than his ego: the function is performed when it produces an appropriate effect in the patient. An incorrect interpretation will often leave the patient ‘untouched.’ It is when the patient does not seem to respond that a mistake can be assumed.
Thus, what Freud highlights is that the effect upon the patient is the measure of the technique rather than its validity. It is a question of the impact of a construction or interpretation rather than its epistemological validity. A false construction therefore has the fate of simply ‘dropping out.’ In all cases Freud makes the unconscious — touching the unconscious — the real test of the validity of a construction. Thus, what matters is not the patient’s immediate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to an interpretation or construction but rather its future effect on the treatment by way of a measure of whether or not it has adequately touched the unconscious.
There is however one tell-tale sign of the success of a construction: if it opens up and broadens the domain of the patient’s “recollection.” Freud admits that this does not always happen.
Freud concludes the text by likening constructions to delusions: “the delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment — attempts at explanation and cure, though it is true that these, under the conditions of a psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had already been disavowed in the remote past.” Thus, a construction seems to be similar in a sense to a delusion, and this, already, seems to indicate, once again, that the construction is not in the order of an epistemologically verifiable truth. Yet, it does not, for that reason, cease to be important in the mental lives of individuals.
Freud seems here to admit up front also that these constructions, like delusions, are “inaccessible to logical criticism” and sometimes “contradict reality:” “in spite of this, they are able to exert extraordinary power over men.” Freud states that they have their basis in a “historical truth” that is repressed in the forgotten and primeval past and yet does it not also indicate that they reveal the possibility of instigating some stability, that is, of instigating that very past which never anyway existed?
