Telling Facts. History And Narration In Psychoanalysis. (Psychiatry And The Humanities, Vol. 13)

All of the essays in this book are epistemologically postpositivist. They assume that psychoanalysis is something other than a natural, or even a social, science. They also tend, in varying degrees, toward postmodernism, especially insofar as they call into question the distinction between fact and fiction, concept and trope, construction and discovery. Moreover, they are by no means introductory. They presuppose a substantial familiarity with hermeneutic and postmodernist concerns. Hence they will not be to everybody's taste. They are, however, of a uniformly high quality. In fact, as one long accustomed to disappointment when it comes to such collections, I was gratified to find so much that was worth reading in so brief a compass.

The collection's parameters are suggested by its opening and closing essays. The former, by Roy Schafer, is a lucid reflection on Freud's legacy. Schafer views Freud as initiating a kind of dialogue or discourse, one that is meaningfully susceptible to linguistic and rhetorical analysis. He is sensitive to the ways in which power (especially the power of psychoanalytic organizations) has influenced psychoanalytic knowledge. And he views clinical psychoanalysis as involving the employment of deconstructive modalities. The latter essay, by Hayden White, is a reflection on the narrative aspects of historical inquiry. White grants that history involves chronicles or sequential records of events; but he emphasizes the ways in which historians employ and tell stories with these facts. Thus, the lines between historical analysis and literary criticism are blurred, and