A series of differing explanations of a puzzling case of psychosomatic illness introduces some reflections on a century's history of psychoanalytic interest in the mind-body problem. Freud and Janet explained the physical symptoms of hysteria using radically different models of the mind. Since then Janet's model, banished early on, has returned to haunt the castle of psychoanalysis. The enduring influence of Janet's model on subsequent thought in this field, especially that of Marty and de M'Uzan, Sifneos, LeDoux, and others, is traced, as is the influence of Freud's model on Groddeck, Alexander, McDougall, Fonagy, and others. It is argued that although these models are vastly different at one level of abstraction, at a higher level they share an important set of assumptions.

A psychoanalytic study of some of the phenomena of multiple personality disorder (MPD), this paper takes issue with the view that a falling apart, fragmentation, or disaggregation of the mind is at the bottom of MPD's characteristic symptoms. Since first proposed by Janet in 1889, the view that ordinarily integrated parts of the mind separate from the center, accounting for the appearance of separate "selves," has prevailed among workers in this field. The close psychoanalytic study of a case of MPD suggests that, to the contrary, the appearance of multiplicity may derive from an essentially unitary but nonetheless powerful set of organizing fantasies centering on the idea that one's body and mind can be taken over and controlled by persons other than oneself. The data of the case under study suggest, further, that certain of the details of these patients' histories of childhood sexual and physical abuse may be of great importance in explaining the extraordinary organizing power of their fantasies of being occupied and controlled. In this connection, special attention is directed to the very commonly reported experiences of forced violation and the involuntary filling and emptying of their bodies during childhood.

The psychoanalytic process of reconstruction has yet to be examined from the perspective of today's two-person psychologies. Earlier writers on the subject have implicated the analyst and his emotional involvement as influences that may distort the valid recovery of memories, while others have written that the transference and the reconstructed past are interdependent. By contrast with both views, it is suggested here that the reconstructed product itself may reflect the transference-countertransference engagement of the dyad: in some instances, and to some extent in all instances, the scene or story of the presumed past will be a version of the current analytic relationship. In certain cases consideration of the conscious and unconscious emotional entanglements of the dyad will reveal that the reconstruction says more about the analytic present than about the past. Freud's Wolf Man case provides a good illustration of this point. While a broad consensus exists that its famous primal scene reconstruction cannot be veridical, it has most often been dismissed as distorted by Freud's theoretical commitments. A closer examination of the relationship between Freud and Pankejeff reveals that the reconstruction is an accurate rendering of warded-off aspects of the dyad's way of being together. The potential clinical utility of adopting this perspective is that it encourages the analyst to reflect on his clinical reconstructions, interrogating them for clues to otherwise elusive aspects of the current clinical relationship.

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