Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (III)
Freud now continues his defense of the analytic, “interpretive” method against charges of arbitrariness and unfalsifiability. He clarifies: “[W]e are not at all inclined to neglect the indications that can be inferred from the patient‘s reaction when we have offered him one of our constructions” (262). The analyst, accused of “invariably twisting his [i.e. the patient’s] remarks into a confirmation” (262), must rather pursue an examination that is “not so simple” (262).
In the following passages, Freud suggests that “Yes” and “No” introduce distinct ambiguities, hence raise different difficulties for the analyst. The patient’s “Yes” — “Your reconstruction of my past is correct” — may reflect an authentic validation, but it may just as easily, perhaps more easily, represent resistance. The patient’s unconscious strategy is then something like, 'I will assent to this reconstruction of my past, and so forestall any further inroads into the genuinely repressed, hence more alarming layers of mind.’ So Freud concludes, in a useful embellishment of the “fecundity” thesis, with the following statement:
“The Yes‘ has no value unless it is followed by indirect confirmations, unless the patient, immediately after his ‘Yes’, produces new memories which complete and extend the construction. Only in such an event do we consider that the Yes‘ has dealt completely with the subject under discussion.” (262)
We may quibble here with Freud’s qualifier — that the sought-after confirmation must arrive “immediately after his ‘Yes’,” in the form of additional, related memories. After all, a moment earlier, Freud is perfectly willing to allow cases in which the “reaction is postponed” (261), which would make the “immediacy” desideratum unnecessary and potentially misleading. (On the other hand, it would be difficult to maintain that only a “No,” and never a “Yes,” may induce postponed confirmation.)
This quibble notwithstanding, Freud’s point is well-taken, since in principle it enables us to discriminate a “resistant” affirmation, devised to throw an analyst off the scent, from a genuine one. The recognition of a construction by the patient’s unconscious “announces” itself by generating fresh material in the neighborhood of that construction. By contrast, Freud implies that an affirmation motivated essentially by resistance would not be accompanied by any spontaneous issue of memories that both validate and amplify the construction.
(Can we not imagine a patient who inadvertently fabricates memories that echo and fill out the analyst’s conjectures, from some combination of motives — say, suggestion, an eagerness to please the analyst, or even resistance itself? This is not a possibility that Freud seems to be aware of, still less one he addresses. Nonetheless, in light of scandals surrounding false “recovered memories,” it is an objection that even charitable readers of Freud may want to raise.)
The patient’s “Yes,” then, is questionable for the reasons Freud describes, and the analyst ought not to receive it as a definitive, or even a tentative confirmation of a construction. All the more, then, will these scruples apply to the patient’s “No,” which “is indeed of even less value” (262) for the purposes of verification. Only in “rare cases,” Freud proposes, is a “No” an “expression of a legitimate dissent” (262). This claim seems to imply at least two things:
By the time a conjecture is formulated and communicated by a conscientious analyst, it must contain some prima facie truth which a patient cannot legitimately reject, at least summarily.
Even where the conjecture is wrong, as a rule the patient’s unconscious — the only arbiter, after all, that matters — simply would not express its rejection in this manner, that is, with a simple “No.” (This may be an adjunct of Freud’s contemporaneous thesis that “negation” has no meaning or reality for the unconscious.)
So Freud continues:
“Far more frequently it expresses a resistance which may have been evoked by the subject-matter of the construction that has been put forward but which may just as easily have arisen from some other factor in the complex analytic situation.” (262-3)
In fact, to repeat, even when the conjecture is altogether mistaken, the patient’s “No” is more likely to signal resistance than a legitimate recognition of its falseness. Freud continues that, where the “No” is grounded in something more than resistance — where its validity is not merely fortuitous — it indicates that the conjecture is not altogether mistaken, but simply “incomplete.” Freud’s point here is intriguing:
“Since every such construction is an incomplete one, since it covers only a small fragment of the forgotten events, we are free to suppose that the patient is not in fact disputing what has been said to him but is basing his contradiction upon the part that has not yet been uncovered. As a rule he will not give his assent until he has learnt the whole truth — which often covers a very great deal of ground. So that the only safe interpretation of his ‘No’ is that it points to incompleteness; there can be no doubt that the construction has not told him everything.” (263)
What are we to make of this position? Freud does not provide an example of a patient’s ‘No’ that points, not to a construction’s patent falseness, but to its incompleteness. He might have several things in mind. A construction such as, “You witnessed your parents having sex when you were an infant,” might be deemed “incomplete” inasmuch as the exact circumstances of the “scene” have not yet been enumerated. (A complete reckoning might accordingly run: “At age one and half, while in your parents’ bedroom, you witnessed them in such-and-such a sexual configuration” — as things turn out in Freud’s “Wolf Man” account.) But the construction might also be viewed as incomplete inasmuch as it is un-supplemented by other, equally general constructions. (In this case, the initial conjecture might be “completed” with the lines: “Before witnessing this scene, you felt your provided all gratification to your mother,” and other, similar addenda.)
Perhaps Freud intended both types of incompleteness. In either case, however, we will certainly want to ask: on what basis does Freud distinguish the one, unequivocal ‘No’ (‘Your conjecture is wrong in toto —nothing like the scene you’ve posited ever occurred’), from the other ‘No’ (‘Your conjecture applies only to a part of my history’)? And then, of course: on what basis does Freud routinely decide in favor of the second?
After all, from the patient’s conscious perspective, the ‘No’ plainly means the first, and emphatically not the second. It is perhaps too obvious to emphasize, but a patient who consciously recognized a conjecture as “partially correct” would not say “No” at all, but rather something like, “Yes — but there are other parts that must be filled in.” So Freud must mean that, nonetheless, from the unconscious perspective, a ‘No’ does announce “Yes, but…” Both Freud’s distinction between “Nos” and his conviction that the “Yes, but…” signification is what generally obtains, awaits some separate justification. Finally, only Freud’s experience with “indirect” evidence licenses the distinction and his conviction regarding it.