On Constructing Historical Truths

Haydée Faimberg, MD
Training and Supervising Analyst, Paris Psychoanalytical Society (by invitation)

Introduction by Theodore J. Jacobs, MD

Monday, April 20, 2009
8:30 pm
Einhorn Auditorium, Lenox Hill Hospital
131 East 76th Street, New York, NY

Educational Objectives: Participants will 1) learn how to listen to how the patient listens to the analyst’s interpretations and silence; and 2) understand the importance of being able to wait (sometimes for years) for the moment the patient brings up, with his/her associations, material that allows the (re)construction of historical truths.

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of historical truths in analysis.
Historical truths refer not to the actual events that have occurred in an individual's life, but to the unconscious meanings that they have for that person as they are discovered in the psychoanalytical treatment. These unconscious ideas and fantasies often exert profound effects on an individual's character and development. By means of a clinical example, the author seeks to demonstrate how reconstruction of these historical truths allows a patient to understand and to own, not the facts of her life as she has known them, but her personal history as it has been (re)constructed in the psychoanalytical process.