Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (II)
We have been discussing Freud’s position on the analytical “construction” of a patient’s biography — at least as that biography was originally experienced and thence repressed. The example Freud offers is of course prototypical, as we saw in the last entry:
“‘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” (261)
Naturally, the analyst will want to know whether, and in what respects, that reconstruction matches “the facts.” But this is a tricky business, since the patient is as yet in no position to measure the analyst’s hypothesis against memories he has, Freud himself insists, repressed.
Now, strictly speaking, Freud is discussing the truth-aptness of “constructions” communicated to patients throughout their analyses, that is, conjectures regarding forgotten memories. But presumably his account would look similar vis-à-vis particular “interpretations” of, say, unconscious impulses. For we are evidently not in an appreciably different situation when assessing these latter. After all, how else might we go about testing conjectures such as: “Your tardiness is an expression of hostility’; or “That ‘accident’ in your speech — you said ‘love’ instead of ‘hate’ — is in reality a ‘slip' betraying your unconscious attitude”? Let us compare the two situations:
Certainly, Freud’s hypothetical patient is not in conscious possession of that precise memory which could authenticate the analyst’s “construction,” e.g. “Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother…” And for good reason: were the patient privy to such conscious memories, both the construction and the whole of analysis would be redundant.
Yet neither, according to Freud, do the patient’s conscious assessments of particular “interpretations” — Yay or Nay — count for much. The patient might respond, “My tardiness expresses no such hostility”; or, conversely, “My substitution of ‘love’ for ‘hate’ does betray some affection, until now disclaimed, for my putative enemy.” The analyst is in either case unmoved, and for the analogous reason that, were the impulse thus “interpreted” consciously accessible to the patient, in some uncomplicated way, that interpretation would — paradoxically — be superfluous.
In both cases, therefore, we will expect some answer to the question of criteria: against what kinds of “data” shall we measure our interpretations and constructions, if not the verbal assent of the patient who — consciously, at least — enjoys no special epistemic privileges in this regard?
As I noted above, the question of criteria frames the essay, which promises “a detailed account of how we are accustomed to arrive at an assessment of the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ of our patients” (257). Thus Freud announces, in so many words, that the patient’s verbal evaluations do not themselves constitute definitive criteria, but must answer to something more reliable, less clouded by the patient’s self-occlusion. Here again, over 30 years later, Freud is elaborating on a dilemma articulated already in An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria:
“It is of course not to be expected that the patient will come to meet the physician half-way with material which has become pathogenic for the very reason of its efforts to lie concealed; nor must the enquirer rest content with the first ‘No’ that crosses his path” (18)
In the middle section of “Constructions,” Freud begins to gesture towards the criterion he has in mind. “The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him” (260), a joint-labor that continues when the analyst “constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him” (260) — that is, a flood set loose precisely by the initial “communication.” To the worry that an analyst may invent and share a false construction, thus “risking the success of the treatment” (261), Freud replies that the mistaken analyst runs no such risk: “What in fact occurs in such an event is rather that the patient remains as though he were untouched by what has been said” (261), and indeed — taking this “unperturbed" reaction as a measure — “if nothing further develops we may conclude that we have made a mistake” (261).
With these lines, Freud anticipates the considered view he will in a moment defend explicitly: a construction is demonstrably “correct” if, and to the extent that, it “works upon” the patient, in such a way that it induces an eruption of “fresh material.” By contrast, a construction is demonstrably mistaken when, after waiting for that effect, the analyst perceives that the patient remains “untouched” by the communication, and there is no “fresh material pouring in upon him.”