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From the post-modern perspective of the waning years of the twentieth century, a book which is titled Telling Facts may sound a little too innocent for its own good. As we begin to realise that truth is in the telling as much as in what is being told, the standing of a simple fact becomes that much more difficult to establish. If the analysand does indeed tell facts, it is not always clear where they begin and end, how much the fact is largely in the mind of the analyst, and how much it differs from a previous telling with perhaps a different emphasis. Because facts in the analytic setting almost always imply memories, they can never be merely 'shown' during a session, and much recent writing has focused on the different kinds of discourse.
Does the analysand talk as if he/she were alone in the room, or is the story clearly being told to someone else? Perhaps certain facts only appear in the first (monologue) model because the patient feels less embarrassed if the analyst is made to seem not present. Other facts, perhaps less revealing or more self-reinforcing, are clearly told to another. Modes of telling, in turn, affect the memory of both analyst and analysand, and some forms of telling may, in effect, take the event entirely out of the here-and-now and erase it from the memories of those present. As recorded cases are gradually gaining currency, we begin to see ways of comparing what was said with what was remembered (as in process notes) and understand something more of the way in which modes of telling can influence the gist of published case studies.
Many of these issues surface in one or more chapters of this book, sometimes in slightly different language or changes of emphasis. Several authors focus on the question of whether the stories told by the analysand are translations or transformations of the something being described. Two authors (Humphrey Morris and Cynthia Chase) choose the first option, with its connotations of reversibility and veridica