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The epistemological status of the “fictive” in psychoanalysis is of increasing significance to practicing analysts. Roy Schafer (1980) has already convincingly demonstrated that we speak to patients in fictive modes by employing rhetorical devices and privileging
certain tropes that exemplify our particular theory of mind. For the most part, we do this unwittingly. For example, our theories provide us with reifying collections of facile metaphors that too easily serve the patient's (and analyst's) unconscious subversion of the psychoanalytic process. I would add that analysts of different persuasions also possess varying degrees of countertransference attitudes and reactions to the inevitable “fictive” presence in their and their patients' constructions. The passions that have accompanied recent debates on narrative truth versus historical truth in psychoanalysis testify to the presence of these deeply felt issues.
Is there, in fact, a profound affinity between the “fictive” and the “psychoanalytic?” Certainly Freud was aware of the potentially embarrassing affinity between his new science and fiction. He felt that such recognition would undoubtedly elicit the suspicions of his colleagues. In his discussion of the case of Fraulein Elizabeth Von R., Freud (1893-1895) apologetically wrote:
I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electroprognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this… (pp. 160-161)
Note that Freud emphasized “the nature of the subject” and demanded this affinity between story telling and psychoanalysis be acknowledged, no matter what the opprobrium.
Freud, of course, made numerous and continuously life-long claims to scientific rationality a