Psychoanalytic Life History: Is Coherence, Continuity, and Aesthetic Appeal Necessary?

This paper critically examines recent attempts to reformulate psychoanalysis from a narrative viewpoint. The contributions of Schafer, Spence, Loch, and Geha, as well as Habermas and Ricoeur, toward reinterpreting psychoanalysis within a narrative context are explored. While endorsing their thrust to rethink psychoanalysis from a nonpositivistic perspective, I challenge here the notion that in psychoanalysis the analyst and the analysand jointly undertake the task of constructing for the analysand a revised biography; a new life-historical narrative whose validity is assessed by its degree of coherency, continuity, and by its aesthetic appeal. The narrative as a form of organizing our experiences and reality is explored by examining Plato's vengeful attack on the poetic experience and his choice of narration as the more refined mode of expression. The affinity between the narrative approach, Platonism, and ego psychology is pointed out. The narrative approach, I argue, is embedded in the assumptions of ego psychology which

construes the “healthy” self as a cohesive and unified entity. The narrativity, coherence, and continuity of the past, I contend, are by-products of the censoring work of the ego. All too smooth and conclusive psychoanalytic constructions expunge the ambiguous, overdetermined and contradictory aspects of our lived experience and are thus exterior to and decentered from the Freudian subject. Lacan's view of subjectivity as inherently divided and discontinuous is offered as an alternative framework for further exploring the idea of psychoanalytic narratives without, however, compromising Freud's central discovery—the idea that subjectivity in its essence is split and discontinuous.