This document summarizes Freud's 1937-38 attempt to differentiate between the terms "interpretation" and "construction" in psychoanalysis. Freud needed a term to help organize the large amounts of material from patient free association. He began using "interpretation" to refer to what he was trying to make sense of in a dream or session, while "construction" referred to the overall historical narrative of the patient's life plotted in terms of cause and effect. Constructions were important for dealing with patient infantile amnesia and reconstructed elements like primal scenes that may not be fully conscious. Freud drew parallels between psychoanalysis and archaeology, viewing psychoanalysis as excavating different unconscious levels over time.

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CLINICAL NOTES
Sigmund Freud (1937--38). ‘Constructions in Analysis,’ Psychoanalytic Clinical
Interpretation, edited by Louis Paul (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), pp. 65-
78.
These clinical notes summarize Freud’s attempt to differentiate between the terms
‘interpretation’ and ‘constructions’ in analysis from 1937-38.
The need for this analytic distinction came from Freud’s realization that the term
‘interpretation’ was doing a lot more work that it was designed to do.
Freud needed a term that would help him to organize the huge amounts of material
that came up through acts of free-association by the patient.
So he began to use the term ‘interpretation’ to refer to what he was trying to make
sense of in a particular dream or in a particular session of analysis.
The over-all historical narrative of the patient’s life which would be emplotted in
terms of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ would then serve as the ‘construction’ that was made
possible in analysis.
Needless to say, the earlier parts of the analysis would focus on interpretation and
the latter part of analysis would concentrate on coming up with a historical
construction; or, to be more accurate, a historical reconstruction of the main events of
the patient’s life.
This is the aspect of psychoanalysis that appeals to archaeologists and historians
since they have a professional need to be able to reconstruct a sequence of events
from the information made available by their sources and excavation sites.
Freud had a large collection of antiquities in his clinic which he insisted on taking
with him to London when he was fleeing from Vienna. His fondness for these

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antiquities was not reducible to that of a collector. They were symbolic for him of the
innumerable archaeological digs into the unconscious.
So, for instance, in this paper Freud invokes the technical difference between the
different levels of the archaeological dig during excavations as an analogue for the
process of conducting an analysis.
They have a resemblance to what he terms the topographic model of the mind
comprising consciousness (on the surface); pre-consciousness (that which can be
retrieved with some effort); and the unconscious (that which can only be ‘inferred’ in
terms of interpretations and constructions but not experienced directly).
Each of the antiquities in his clinic is a ‘symptom’ which can be located to a
particular level of the excavation.
In fact, what the symptom means depends almost directly on the level of the dig at which it
was found rather than in the fact that it was found.
An archaeologist knows when he digs through the excavation that several levels
exist at the same time. Likewise, an analyst is somebody who knows that earlier
layers of the mind co-exist with the levels at the top (i.e. of consciousness).
So when Freud began to formulate the differences between interpretation and
constructions, this is what he has in mind.
This distinction can also be understood in terms of historical narratives which
explain the rise and fall of civilizations. That is why - in terms of analytic method –
Freud’s work has attracted the attention of his fellow workers in archaeology and
history.
What all these areas have in common is the need to explain the relationship between
cause and effect across a number of spatial and temporal layers.
There is however an important difference between what the archaeologist does and
what the analyst does.

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The archaeologist cannot speak to the antiquities; he merely digs them out or tries to
situate them in the larger context of the excavation.
The analyst however can speak to the patient to see if he is willing to produce
corroborative evidence when they put different pieces of the construction together.
Sometimes the patient has fresh memories; or he is able to recall vividly details of a
given scene assuring the analyst that he is on the right path. This is because of the
‘upward drive’ of the unconscious.
It takes a lot of effort on ‘repression proper’ to prevent the content of the
unconscious from becoming known to the patient and the analyst. But the resistance,
if any, is not from the unconscious.
It is almost as though the main differences between antiquities and symptoms is that
the former are waiting for the archaeologist to dig them out, but the latter are
reaching out to the analyst; they are, as Freud put it elsewhere (in his studies on
hysteria), ‘joining in the conversation’ in the analytic situation.
Historians of psychoanalysis have come to the conclusion that Freud’s interest in
archaeology must be taken seriously because it has important implications for his
methodology as demonstrated in papers like this.
Constructions matter then because there is no other way to deal with the ‘infantile
amnesia’ of the patient. They are related to terms like ‘primal scene,’ ‘phantasy,’ and
‘delusions’ which also have to be reconstructed in analysis because they may not be
fully conscious to the patient.
There is a huge literature on the similarities and differences between forms of
historical explanation and psychoanalytic explanation, but going into that will be
beyond the scope of these clinical notes.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN