Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (I)
Freud’ frames his “Constructions” essay as a rebuttal to critics charging psychoanalysis with a bankrupt epistemology — one that, as Karl Popper will later argue, cannot be falsified. Psychoanalytic interpretations are, so runs the criticism, impervious to refutation: either the patient affirms the analyst’s interpretation explicitly, or else rejects it — that is, evinces a “resistance” that likewise ratifies the analyst’s conjecture (257).
What Freud emphasizes in the piece, however, is that — in point of fact — neither the patient’s “Yes” nor his “No” counts for very much in assessing an interpretation’s truth-value. Authentic validation emerges, if it emerges, only indirectly, in the form of a certain “fecundity” in the patient’s productions in response to the intervention: associations, dreams, fantasies, transferential behaviors, and — if all goes well — a remission of symptoms. Far from retreating to the unfalsifiable standpoint, as one unnamed critic puts, of “Heads I win, tails you lose” (257), psychoanalysis looks past both heads and tails, in favor of evidence that enjoys a certain “independence” from the passing views of analyst and patient alike.
Before coming to this rebuttal, though, Freud clarifies the more general problems and aims involved. To what sort of object, after all, do these “interpretations” properly apply? What, indeed, is the motivation for these interpretations in the first place? To answer these questions, Freud reminds us that the central objective of psychoanalysis consists in “inducing the patient to give up the repressions…belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition” (257). In the service of this objective — the lifting of repressions — the patient must somehow “be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten” (257-8). It is remarkable how closely these 1937 descriptions of the psychoanalytic program match those contained already in the 1905 Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud’s account of Dora:
“Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient's memory. These two aims are coincident. When one is reached, so is the other; and the same path leads to them both” (11)
In short, our objective is to lift the patient’s repressions. But this, paradoxically, involves the recovery of precisely those memories which have been repressed. How, then, does one go about generating these affect-laden recollections — the sine qua non of psychoanalytic progress? How does analysis help the patient recover what has by stipulation been repressed, hence what is not directly accessible to memory?
Analysis must look, in fact, to a range of materials, above all the patient’s “symptoms and inhibitions” (258) which, Freud argues, are in reality “a substitute for these things that he has forgotten” (258). “All kinds of things,” in fact, contribute to the analytical “reconstruction” of a biography otherwise blocked from view: dreams, associations, and repetitions in behavior “both inside and outside the analytic situation” (258) — most notoriously in the “relation of transference…established towards the analyst” (258). On the basis of all this “raw material,” which the patient “put[s] at our disposal” (258), the analyst may gradually “put together what we are in search of” (258). What we want to “reconstruct,” then, is “a picture of the patient’s forgotten years” that is “alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete” (258).
This, then, is the central “task” which falls to the analyst, namely, “to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it” (258-9). Just as the “archaeologist’s excavation” (259) recovers structures buried and lost, while piecing together the whole on the basis of often incomplete remains, so the analyst, through the “work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction” (259), likewise “draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behavior of the subject of the analysis” (259).
After developing a number of analogies (259-260) between archaeological and psychoanalytic “reconstructions” (while allowing several dis-analogies, too), Freud comes to the heart of his argument — equal parts terminological clarification and technical suggestion.
“The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him, deals with it in the same way and proceeds in this alternating fashion until the end. If, in accounts of analytic technique, so little is said about ‘constructions,’ that is because ‘interpretations' and their effects are spoken of instead. But I think that ‘construction’ is by far the more appropriate description. ‘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 lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten, in some such way as this: ‘Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you,’ . . . and so on” (260-61)
In fact, the quoted passage appears to distinguish between “interpretations” and “constructions” in several ways, both explicitly and implicitly.
Most explicitly, interpretations purportedly apply to “single elements” of the patient’s productions, and Freud cites as examples associations and parapraxes. If a patient shows up late to analysis, the analyst may “interpret” that particular act as a hostile gesture. By contrast, it seems, “constructions” are not restricted to single elements, but rather entail the organization of multiple elements into a “constellation” of some kind.
More implicitly, though equally important, an interpretation need not, on the evidence, directly evoke the forgotten history we would like ultimately to recover — even if it points the way to it. Again, the analyst may interpret a patient’s late arrival as unconsciously hostile without thinking or saying anything about its genesis in a history unknown to both analyst and patient. By contrast, once more, a “construction” does represent the patient’s repressed “prehistory” — presumably on the basis of some number of (now agglomerated) “interpretations.”
It is here that Freud addresses the well-known “falsifiability” charge against analytic procedure, and in doing so throws valuable light on the epistemic standing of psychoanalysis more generally. For how do we know when our conjectures have hit their mark? I will take up this question in the next post.