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the details of a person’s past and present.163 The successful construction is based on data that increasingly demand a particular hypothesis.
Freud’s own elucidation of a construction is extremely relevant to the one under consideration—namely, that Freud’s intense ambivalence about religion involved a strong pro-Christian component. Early in his discussion of the nature of a construction, Freud made the important point that a patient’s “No” is “not as a rule enough to make us abandon an interpretation as incorrect.”164 In turn, I do not accept Freud’s proposed, “No, I have no attraction to Christianity with its ‘lie of salvation.’”165 Indeed, with respect to Freud and Christianity, the old saw usually applied to diplomats and politicians appears to be quite applicable: “Nothing is officially confirmed until officially denied.” Freud himself encouraged us to put aside his own “No” when he wrote about the person being analyzed that he must be brought “to recollect certain experiences and the emotions called up by them which he has at the moment forgotten. We know that his present symptoms and inhibitions are the consequences of repressions of this kind….”166 A construction, which Freud claimed gives “a picture of the patient’s forgotten years,”167 is based on All kinds of things. He [the patient] gives us fragments of memories in his dreams…he produces ideas, if he gives himself up to “free associations,” in which we can discover allusions to the repressed experiences and derivatives of the suppressed affective impulses, as well as the reactions against them.168 Let us look back over this quotation—and apply the definitions provided by Freud the great psychoanalyst to the dreams and remarks of Freud the neurotic and Freud the ambivalent:
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