All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution . No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the JHU Press . This revolutionary publishing model depends on mutual trust between user and publisher . In these hallowed halls where post-modernism has reigned for a decade, I shall open this meeting not by reflecting upon deconstruction, but rather upon reconstruction.
Deconstruction involves the questioning, even the bashing of precious substantive assumptions.
Reconstruction involves the dialogue between assumptions, a process of continuous recontextualization arriving at new symbolic meanings. I believe that this process of reconstruction is aptly illustrated by the significance of this exhibit, but it also, perhaps more cogently, applies to the life work of our opening speaker. . . . The Hamburg Congress of 1985 was an historic moment in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. It marked the first occasion since the 1932 Wiesbaden Congress of holding such a meeting on German soil. This idea had first been proposed in 1977 in Jerusalem but met with opposition then.