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Freud's declaration that hysterics suffer from “reminiscences” (Freud, 1913, p. 207) established that the boundary between psychic and external reality is indeed thin. Neurotic symptoms causing actual limitations almost invariably emanate from personal narratives that are far not only from consciousness but also from external reality. Character deformations are similarly based upon unwitting, chronic replications of internalized self-object relations scenarios. Kris' (1956) notion of “personal myth” in normalcy and pathology also speaks to the fact that the distinction between fact and fiction frequently gets blurred in the construction and experience of human lives.
Understanding this has a dual consequence. First, a perspective of this sort encourages inquiry of the intrapsychic causes of the “real” difficulties of our patients. Second, it prompts us to see what is avowed “fiction” as having the potential to shed light upon our existential realities. But this is not all. In our efforts to discern the nature of our patient's anguish, we often co-create narratives with ameliorative plausibility. And, in reading fiction, we search for clues to psychic configurations with ubiquitous applicability. In both exercises, we travel from surface to depth and oscillate between empathic immersion and objective assessment. The two methods of processing the data offered us yield different sets of information and it is by combining these observations that we arrive at a meaningful understanding.
It is in this spirit that we offer the following psychoanalytic essay on Sándor Márai's novel Embers. The essay's Amsterdam-based authors Frans de Jonghe and Saskia de Maat depart from the ordinary conventions of a book review (Akhtar and Gabbard, 2000) and take us on a labrynthine sojourn of reading fiction with a deep psychological lens. The result is illuminating and heartwarming.