You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This issue of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse deals with the question of narration in psychoanalysis. It portrays but a small fraction of the intense debate that has occurred in French psychoanalysis over the years since the appearance of Serge Viderman's important and as yet untranslated volume.1 Positions similar to Viderman's have also been developed in our own literature by Roy Schafer and Donald Spence. Narration is a controversial issue, and, in addition, some important issues in psychoanalysis have been raised in the discussion of these controversies.
Briefly, the claim is that, during an analysis, analyst and patient build up a myth of what or who the patient is. This myth has healing power. But what relation does this myth have to the veridical truth that analysis is also supposedly concerned with? Do we give up any hope of finding out wie es eigentlich gewesen war, how it really was? Is such a search for past truths simply detective work that does not necessarily have any healing power? Or is the development of the personal myth, even though curative in some sense —i.e., the patient gets better—a sort of newer version of the development of resistance that has sometimes been held to be at the heart of Jungian analysis and in many psychotherapies?
In the course of consideration of the narrative in psychoanalysis, many issues turn up: the place of the word in psychoanalysis, i.e., in free association versus an organized narrative account of the past;