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In a recent issue of this journal, in pursuing his ideas of “narrative truth” and narrative persuasion, Spence (1983) takes me to task on a number of points. While specific disagreement and differing points of view would not move me to respond to Spence's criticisms, what does prompt me to write this rebuttal—I should say correction—is his inaccurate presentation of my position and the importance of the issues involved. I am concerned lest readers of this journal obtain a mistaken notion of what my position is and a false idea of the nature of the real issues that are generated by Spence's conception of historical truth and narrative truth.
Spence's first criticism is that it does not follow from his position, as I have purportedly argued, “that analysts simply go around making up stories” (Spence, 1983, p. 469). To provide the reader with the full context of this criticism, I will reproduce below both the few sentences that precede and follow Spence's remarks:
But if we turn from historical truth to narrative truth,
Page 629the criticism loses much of its force. If interpretations depend on being compelling, persuasive, and possibly predictive, they can be effective without necessarily being historically true; and, indeed, the main thrust of our argument has been to show that their historical truth may be their least significant dimension.
From this it does not follow, as Eagle (1980) has recently argued, that analysts simply go around making up stories. To argue for narrative truth is not to claim that analyzing is mere storytelling, or that the analyst is somehow dishonestly claiming for the patient something that he knows in fact is false. Eagle seems to believe that if the truth were known it would be disregarded in favor of the more elegant narrative; on the contrary, we are suggesting that because the truth is never known, the analyst makes as convincing a story as possible with the facts at his disposal and with his best guesses about what the facts might have been l