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I would like to start out from the case presented in the article to show how the interpretation runs according to the epistemic line of thinking. One can agree with the idea that “to be a savior” is a narrative, an interpretation of reality born as an answer to epistemophilic need and as a result of repression. However, it seems to me to be more explanatory to describe the narrative of “being a savior” in the usual terms, as an extensive rationalization which follows and is accompanied by other defense mechanisms, such as projective identification (n.b. the signs of exportation and treatment of sick and needy parts in others) and reactive formations (exaggerated amenability etc.).
No psychoanalyst would deny the need to give a sense to his/her own experiences and behavior (e.g. in the form of hypotheses about the self and the object). However, one specification is necessary. Such narratives have no connection with the original phantasms. In the first place, it is questionable as to what point they are unconscious and moreover, they are built up over time, especially during early adolescence. On the other hand, even if Freud did not clearly distinguish primary phantasms from phantasies (1) (a task first performed by Susan Isaac, with her distinction between fantasy and phantasy) (2), they nonetheless constitute the deepest nucleus of the unconscious.
Further on we come up against the myth of the tyrannical father who kills his sons. This is supposedly the “development and transformation of the previous narrative to be a savior”. Steve “thanks to this fantasy, can feel justified in hating him”. I feel that rooting the myth in the epistemophilic drive is an intellectualistic type of explanation that does not take into account the content of the phantasm. Steve should have at his disposal a vast repertoire of fantasies. All he had to do was choose the one that best suited his persona and his story. And instead he comes up with the most classic and stereotyped myth: that o