On the value of explicit reconstruction

Classical psychoanalysis provides a clinical method and a technique which enable us to help the patient undo primary process transformations of crucial organizing events and the fantasies about them, toward the end of understanding not only the original internal components of conflicts still persisting in the present, but the manner in which the patient originally constructed his or her unique pathogenic system of meaning. That technique involves explicit reconstruction. Private systems of meaning are frequently constructed around the apparently arbitrary contiguities of life, and only the reconstruction of those contiguities can reveal to the patient how he or she has understood and continues to understand the data of external perception. An extended clinical example is presented.