A Response to The Narration of Desire

To me, a singularly interesting and instructive aspect of The Narration of Desire is the process by which Wrye and Welles created their book and the way they make that creative process available to the reader for examination. They extensively illustrate and discuss various forms of erotic experience, especially ones in which therapists and patients participate together during treatment. However, I see their focus on sexuality functioning essentially to create a specific instance by means of which they address their more fundamental subject: the social construction of individual human motivation. In laying out their line of thought, they make any number of smart and valuable observations about narrative, especially about erotic narrative and the analysis of erotic narrative for therapeutic purposes. But I think that the medium is ultimately the message; it is by example, most of all, that Wrye and Welles show us something crucial concerning intersubjectivity, collaboration, and the evolution of desire.

Throughout their discussion of erotic narrative, Wrye and Welles keep in mind the constitutional sensory foundations of experience, and therefore of memory. They trace the development of desire through the human life cycle, for example, and coin the felicitous term body loveprints to capture the way preverbal contacts continue to be influential as life and desire become exponentially more complex. At the same time, Wrye and Welles speak of sexual desire, and eventually love, not as a hard-wired response, but as a capacity that emerges and is shaped through social contact—importantly, through words and story making. Thus: