Introduction

Perhaps the most significant and exciting new frontier of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and research is the examination of the construction of meaning within the analytic dialogue, a construction that involves prominent narrative features. On this frontier the concern with traditional metapsychological formulations is relegated to the background, if not discarded altogether, in favor of a hermeneutic conception of the entire analytic project. The history of the establishment of this frontier includes existentialist critiques of the natural-science conception of psychoanalysis, the work of Rycroft, George Klein, Sherwood, myself, and others, and the philosophical re-examinations by Ricoeur, Habermas, and others, of the assumptions that control psychoanalytic conceptualization. Much of the current interest in the centrality of the here-and-now transference interpretation and the nature of the psychoanalytic life history is not fully understandable without reference to the work that is being done on this new frontier.

The three papers that follow were presented as part of a panel entitled “On the Construction of the Psychoanalytic Narrative: