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.
In this introductory article, Bertrand provides a succinct discussion, laying out some of the issues for psychoanalytic theory and practice. Freud, with his talking cure, introduced the narrative into psychoanalysis. The patient is asked to give a narrative account of his dreams, memories, daily life, etc., and all these accounts tend to be organized into a narrative. The central question, then, is how the narrative is therapeutic.
Bertrand begins with a general consideration of the use of language in psychoanalysis. The first paradox is found in the relation between narration and free association; the two do not go hand in hand and are even antithetical. Putting thoughts into words in intelligible discourse requires a certain level of watchfulness and wakefulness, while the regression induced by free association resembles the sort of reverie of a person drifting into sleep or dreaming. A certain equilibrium has to be found between regression, on the one hand, and the critical faculty of watchfulness necessary for the words to be organized into a narrative, on the other hand.
This equilibrium is analogous to that which, during sleep, permits the production of the dream that would not take place without the intervention of the dream censor. The paradox is created by none other than the fundamental rule: the analysand is invited to say everything. This invitation to speak whatever comes to mind pulls in two directions, and the word in psychoanalysis is found between