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Is psychoanalysis a biology of the mind or the mind's biography? Freud's synthesis of his conflicting views on the relationship between bodily based desire and adaptation to civilization made the patient's symptoms a form of storytelling and Freud's own intellectual and psychological journey a form of autobiography (Phillips 2014). If, as Freud thought, symptoms are a means of exchange within families and speak of a patient's secret desires, a listener need only translate those signs and their opposition into language. In this way, dialogical storytelling itself becomes a form of biology, one that helps humans prevail against the forces of entropy through retranscription of memory.
But what of distress that has its origins in preverbal development or in response to traumatic events that disconnect semantic memory systems from procedural ones? Might not understanding how art tells stories elucidate the emotional, cognitive, and intersubjective aspects of implicit communication and empathic attunement so central to the psychoanalytic method?
Eric Kandel's book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present, unfurls