Narrative as a Mode of Knowing

Thinkers over the millenium have detected two styles or modes of knowing, although they have used different words to categorize these modes. Medieval Christian scholastics distinguished between knowing by reason and knowing by faith or revelation. Kohut distinguished between knowing by empirical observation and knowing by empathic immersion. Similarly, the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner proposed two ways of knowing: a paradigmatic mode of knowing and a narrative mode of knowing. The paradigmatic mode we know well from the natural sciences. It involves creating predictive models or laws. The narrative mode concerns itself with the motivated reasons for exceptional occurrences and recruits the faculty of empathy. This article jumps off of Bruner’s distinction between these two ways of knowing and argues that narrative is the preeminent mode in psychoanalysis. In the process, I make a distinction between narrative and empathy. The narrative mode requires empathy but it isn’t the same as empathy. Stories transcend our individual subjectivities by connecting different minds, different places and different times. We put ourselves in the grip of a story in order to know more than we can know when we are not in its grip.