Who are the Irmas and What are the Narratives?

There appears to be increasing agreement, even among psychoanalysts themselves, that psychoanalysis is a narrative discipline. As such, it at least implicitly displays the principles of its own “narratology.” First of all, the psychoanalyst is ever concerned with the stories told by his patients, who are patients precisely because of the weakness of the narrative discourses that they present: the incoherence, inconsistency, and lack of explanatory force in the way they tell their lives…. The work of the analyst must in large measure be a recomposition of the narrative discourse to give a better representation of the patient's story, to reorder its events, to foreground its dominant themes, to understand the force of desire that speaks in and through it.

Dreams, poems and novels either have no meaning or several meanings…. Once one has recognized, detected or decided that they have meaning, they become open to interpretation, and characteristically several not mutually exclusive interpretations can be made of them. Characteristically, too, exegesis of these interpretations takes up more space and uses more words, than does the dream, poem or even the novel itself…. It takes Dennis Ward thirteen pages to answer the question, ‘What did the sonnet “The Windhover” mean to Gerard Manley Hopkins?’, i.e., just under a page to a line.