Having told throughout her book the story of how she connects with her patients, Jane Hall arrives at its penultimate chapter to consider the psychoanalytic role of storytelling itself. Here the many clinical vignettes and insights in the book find a home in the appreciation of the stories by patients and dedicated healers alike.
Her endeavor proceeds from a place of open-minded generosity of interest. She credits Ella Sharpe with the instruction for “deep seated curiosity” as the most indispensable working principle. There are no “real true” stories. “Happy stories” are dangerous. Hall is guided by the deep understanding that the spoken, and as yet unspoken, latent stories contain trauma, fantasy, rage, love, your name it—in fact, the naming articulation of their existence is what allows their therapeutic reformation. What accompanies the work along the way is “common sense” and tactful trust in the capacity for connection, even when silence precludes speech and so requires patience and nonverbal attunement. This is, in various permutations, what Jane Hall's consummate account is about.
Genuine humanist interest and intent permeate her work, guided by psychoanalytically informed listening. It is possible to see how it liberates her spontaneity, and how that in turn frees the patient to respond in kind, enhancing therapeutic connectedness. This spontaneity derives from clinical astuteness and a comfortable use of therapeutic technique. But it is also amplified by an openness to being informed by other fields as well. Hall's learning curiosity brings her to consider neuroscientific insights in the interest of applying them to her psychoanalytic acumen. Immersive appreciation of music, literature, art serve to amplify the emotional resonance she curates in the work with her patients. Hall draws from every source that enhances it. She is grateful to psychoanalytic fellow travelers who, like her, found storytelling an inspired way to think about patients and their work with each of them; or others who
advocated tuning in to seemingly incomprehensibly disordered stories told by psychotic patients.
The initial reaction to the chapter on storytelling is likely to be one of as if reading a self-evident testimonial. Mine was, and caused doubt about offering a commentary: what could possibly be added? Every therapist hears patients' stories, starting with the ‘cases’ in their clinical training, including Freud's famous case histories at the foundation of psychoanalysis. Yet, further reflection on this seemingly self-evidentiary nature invited a question: What is it that gives the storytelling its incontrovertibly compelling power? As far back as in the Old Testament the therapeutics of 19/20th century psychoanalysis are foretold in the Book of Job by a character who says, “I will speak that I may find relief” (Job 32:20, in Soloveitchik, 2018). What makes stories indispensable?
It becomes illuminating, as well as simultaneously humbling yet affirming then to see that psychoanalytic listening to stories represents an amazing development in the biological evolution of life, with the humanistic expansion of mentation as its apogee to date (It is yet to be seen what transformations will come about in the aftermath of the algorithmic manufacture of storytelling by human-engendered artificial intelligence.) Individual storytelling is a product of millennial development of the human race while individual stories are an ontogenetic achievement for every person.
In his 2024 book The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together The Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved an archeologist Steven Mithen looks at findings from the fields of archeology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, genetics, ethnology, anatomy and neuroscience. It provides an interesting interdisciplinary exposition of evolutionary intersections between biology and cultural transmission. Over many millennia, language develops as a system of communication in human society, and in turn influences human perception and thought. It makes it possible to convey stories of experience, develop abstract and metaphoric meanings out of them, enhance communal adaptations by their sharing, and create culture. It is this broad evolutionary and cultural human inheritance that met its application in the psychological study and treatment of patients at the end of the 19th century, and it continues to ground and animate the finely attuned work of psychoanalysts such as Jane Hall's. Is it
any wonder then that she draws her inspiration for and her prowess in it from all: patients, teachers, students, art, music, literature? Constrained by the commonality of shared anatomical and cognitive Homo Sapiens features, humans nevertheless have developed variations in both to account for great linguistic diversity. That diversity finds its most exquisite expression yet in the uniqueness of every being and every life. Informed by the outlines and formulations of her clinical and theoretical knowledge of psychology, the analyst is ready to hear every patient in their singular embeddedness in the personal, familial and social storylines. Thus, does she prepare for the intricate work of tending to human wellbeing.
Patients respond to Hall's open minded therapeutic curiosity in listening to their stories because of the manifest empathy of her reception of them. It made me think that her lifelong listening immersion in music, and perhaps especially in the creative improvisational flexibility of jazz, promoted a particular fluidity of mind. She could adjust the ‘keys’ and the ‘vibes’ to tune in, allowing for the einfuhlung, the feeling with another, that makes possible the establishment of therapeutic trust. But it is not empathy for its own sake alone that seems to be at work for Hall. There is respect and pleasure in the individuality of each patient, which gives each of them, and the story each brings to tell, a compelling reason to matter, and thus be worthy of being told and heard. What makes it possible to conjoin them to deploy the empathetic interest in individuality? Psychoanalytic theorizing by various schools of thought, aided by infant/child research and neuroscientific findings have provided rich insights into their development by examining the psychic conditions of early life. Hall's clinical and theoretical acumen is deeply informed by her interest and integrated knowledge of them.
It turns out, though, that before the advent of psychoanalysis, or psychology as such in general, an interesting attempt at elucidating the processes responsible for both intersubjectivity of empathy and individuality took place in the Age of Enlightenment by philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He advanced the thought that the process of forming the idea of an “I” develops as the individual identifies with those he perceives as like himself, earning the credit of being a pivotal theorist of the formation of the individual selfhood through intersubjectivity and mutual recognition. To him, the formation of a distinct “self” and self-consciousness, or personal identity is part of a developmental process, one
that is the result of a process of the individual interacting with the environment and especially with one's fellow human beings. And, in the spirit of the age, he extends the concepts of identity and identification not only to individual development but also to the development of human society (Scott, 2024).
It is likely not a coincidence that Rousseau's innovative and influential thought in this regard dovetailed with the establishment of the scientific field of ethnology in the 18th century. After nearly three centuries of sea travel to distant lands encountering foreign ethnicities and societies, it may have been the new field of ethnology that in its interest in other cultures was guided by a social sense of mutuality, paving the way for the evolution of intersubjectivity of empathy. Encountering ‘others’ made it possible to awaken to it and to observe it. And so, Rousseau found affectionate recognition for his intuition of empathic identification in the 1962 speech Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man by the 20th century ethnologist Claude Levy-Strauss (Levy-Strauss, 1976).
When an analyst speaks of storytelling by her patient, as Hall does in her chapter and throughout her book. she in effect reports on traversing a boundary and visiting an ‘other’. Her manner of recounting an individual history along with its particular personal mythology is not altogether dissimilar to that of an ethnologist. Not entirely unlike him in relation to the inhabitant tribe of a foreign land, she tunes in to the abstract poetry of shareable metaphor so as to be able to decipher their individual psychological significance in her patient's case while at the same time learning the specific lexicon of the patient's way of transmitting intrinsic personal meanings. What drives each of them on in those pursuits? What is the motivation for such curiosity in the other tribe/person and what might be the consequence?
Rousseau offers strikingly modern formulations that pertain (Scott, 2024), which may impress an analyst for their resonance with Freud's formulations a century and a half later:
“The positive or attracting action is the simple work of nature, which seeks to extend and reinforce the sentiment of our being; the negative or repelling action, which compresses and diminishes the being of another, is a combination produced by reflection. From
Page 94the former arise all the loving and gentle passions, and from the latter all the hateful and cruel passions.”
“There is a purely passive physical and organic sensitivity [sensibilité] which seems to have as its end only the preservation of our bodies and of our species through the direction of pleasure and pain.”
“when the strength of an expansive soul has me identify myself [m'identifie] with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself”
When an ethnologist travels to a distant land s/he expands and alters her being and that of her own society by entering—and identifying with—another culture. The analyst does something similar when entering the story of her patient's experience. She, too, will not be the same in consequence of those encounters. Hall knows this when she expresses her gratitude to her patients, her colleagues and students: they expand the sphere of her own understanding and wisdom, readying it for transmission to others patients, students and readers of her book.
Are there any possible pitfalls to be aware of? Surely—if the analogy to ethnology holds—this is not an altogether idle question. The attractions of visiting distant lands brought with them expansions in the form of exploitation and colonization. Is there a cautionary note in this for psychoanalysis and psychoanalyst?
Here's Rousseau again:
“Pity is sweet because, in putting ourselves in the place of the one who suffers, we nevertheless feel the pleasure of not suffering as he does” (Emile, 219–21).
An analyst might frown at, or smile in recognition of, this suggestion and perhaps the gentle rebuke it represents. Is this a latent, i. e. hidden, motive of the work we otherwise consider laudable for its healing purposes? And if that is so, is it a necessary, if also unavoidable, aspect of it? An analyst needs to know, but not succumb to, the pain of suffering. This is her responsibility: to know the pain so that she could be of help to the suffering of others.
When at the end of the 19th century, Freud veered from the strictly neuroscientific pursuits to founding psychoanalysis on the strength of the stories in the Studies on Hysteria, he brought the enlightenment of the preceding ages into the psychological project of improving human lot. To do that, he devised a new language to teach about ‘transference’ and ‘countertransference’ so as to forge the path to empathic communion with an other, including the other within the analyst herself. It is this nesting dolls mutuality that Jane Hall's spotlight on storytelling helps us to bear in mind.