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A short review of Time and Narrative can hardly do justice to the broad range of issues covered; instead I will focus on those topics that are particularly relevant to either psychoanalytic theory or practice.
1. The reality of the past. Ricoeur sees history as standing for, or taking the place of, what really happened; it is our name for something back in time that happened once and will never happen again. He divides the sense of the past into three parts, labeled the Same, the Other, and the Analogous. If we believe in the first, we see written history as a reenactment of what once really happened. The historian's task is then to “construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened” (taking a phrase from Collingwood, cited on p. 145). Seeing history as colored by traces of the Other, we see it as a “restoration of temporal distance…[and this approach] turns against the ideal of reenactment” (p. 147). From this point of view, we are tempted to emphasize differences rather than similarities, to underscore the alien and the obscure in the record of what happened, and to resist, in short, any attempt to assimilate the foreign to the familiar. It can be seen that such a stance may actually produce a more faithful account and work to preserve the differences that matter. In psychoanalysis, a respect for differences may provide more space for the patient to re-create the earlier moments in a way that does them the most justice (and in a way that produces, often enough, the strangest story).
Treating a history as something analogous to what happened, we make room for the idea of reconstruction and for different genres of representation—fiction is only one of the many possibilities. Giving up Collingwood's hope of entering into the lives of historical figures (or of the early experience of our