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The need to tell a story seems universal. The reasons are numerous: for remembrance and to assuage loss, to explain oneself and the world, to expiate guilt, to gain acceptance, to repeat and master a traumatic experience. Whether the story is told by writers, patients, or parlor raconteurs, the teller is motivated to express, gratify, and/ or defend against his own apposite fears and wishes. Furthermore, in these actions he requires confirmation from an audience or readership as protection against the consequences of breaches of repression and interdictions of the inner agencies of conscience, ideals, and standards. The reader requires similar expression and protection. Multiple levels of personality are brought into play, notably so by a talented writer whose integrations and sublimations subordinate the story, characters, plot, and situation to a profound transformation of values and to a developed autonomy from the deeper or primary persona] motives.
The defenses, expectations, fantasies, and transformations of both author and audience must mesh intimately in order for the narration to be successful (Holland, 1978). Telling an offcolor joke, for example, demands that both the speaker and listener breach cultural and personal interdictions embodied in the superego. When the teller has found an audience with whom he may flourish, their collaboration entails surmounting this guilt and anxiety. Conserving energy otherwise consumed by repression, they will together maximize their pleasure and laughter (Freud, 1905).
Moreover, “the art of fiction is social” (Sachs, 1942). We suggest, following Sachs, that any story expresses elements of communal daydreams, shared in part by teller and reader/listener, derived and transformed in part from the heritage of the culture.