Bellin, E. H. (1984) - The Psychoanalytic Narrative On The Transformational Axis Between Writing and Speech

(1984).
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 7: 3-42
The Psychoanalytic Narrative
On the Transformational Axis Between Writing and Speech
Evan H. Bellin, M.D.
1. Challenge to Common Sense Determinism

Common sense biographies of individuals describe their past life events as determining future ones. Such positivistic
narratives assume that past events determine present and future patterns of fantasies, feelings, thoughts, and actions, all assumed
to be linked in a chain of cause and effect that is measurable on an axis of real time. Positivistic science transforms this common
sense chain into a kind of sacred text, on which commentary is recognized as valid only according to similar carefully specified
rules of repetitive observation and interpretation. Such a positivistic text in psychoanalytic theory is the notion of psychic
determinism. Waelder (1930) elaborated on this notion with the idea of multiple function; and, recently,
Dr. Bellin is Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York.
I would like to express my appreciation to Kermit W. Moyer, Ph.D., Roy Schafer, Ph.D., and numerous colleagues at the Columbia University Center for
Psychoanalytic Training and Research for their encouragement and helpful suggestions in the completion of earlier drafts of this article.
-3-
Brenner (1976) outlined its preserve in the ubiquitous compromise formation. In clinical practice, psychic determinism also
informs psychoanalytic reconstruction, which patiently elicits the organized specificity of past events that have contributed to an
individual's defensive and adaptational development.
But despite Freud's early positivistic aspirations in Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and despite positivistic
elaborations in contemporary theory, psychoanalysisfrom its beginnings in the Fliess correspondence and more definitively in
A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad (1925)has remained at least peripherally at odds with this privileged position of the
notion of the essentialist event. For example, Freud's concept of Nachtraglichkeit in the Project (1895), which Strachey translates
as deferred action, immediately challenges the common sense notion of memory as being simply a retrieval of past events. In
the Project, Freud presents a clinical case of a childhood seduction at the age of 8. The event by itself is not traumatic; rather it is
this event remembered in puberty that becomes traumatic by unconscious association in a new context. Only in puberty is the
sexual act a meaningful reality. Freud writes, Every adolescent individual has memory-traces which can only be understood with
the emergence of sexual feelings of his own; and accordingly every adolescent must carry the germ of hysteria within him (p.
356). In other words, the context of the present signifies and reorders the past. Trauma only becomes clinically meaningful after a
past perceived event becomes retranscribed within a present experience. In 1896, Freud writes to Fliess, I am working on the
assumption that our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification; the material present in the form of
memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstancesto a
re-transcription (1896, p. 235). Even after his recognition of infantile sexuality, Freud maintains this notion of deferred action.
The Wolf Man's reconstructed observation of his parents' coitus at the age of one and one-half
-4-
becomes traumatic only through the medium of a dream at the age of 4 and perhaps only because of an image of dogs copulating
superimposed upon his parents' imagined activities. For Freud, the primal scene can be a primal fantasy (1918). The primacy of
the event withers at the very moment of its reconstruction. That the event must have occurred is unnecessary to the clinical
argument.
2. Freud's Linguistic Theories of Writing and Speech

This dialectical struggle between historical truth and constructed truth pervades Freud's thinking. His idea of past and present
relating in other than a chain of cause and effect undermined any simple rendering of the genesis of psychic structure or any
prosaic explanation of the therapeutic efficacy of the psychoanalytic situation. Both these phenomena required a level of
explanation that transcended the physiological positivism of Freud's scientific contemporaries. Freud transcended that positivism
with a linguistic theory which emerged through metaphors of writing and speech. With these he could begin to describe the power
of words in clinical discourse as well as the structural importance of word-presentations in the psychic apparatus. Freud did not
always clearly distinguish the word spoken from the word written, though for the most part, as we shall see, he relegated the latter
or writing metaphor to his anatomic and genetic description of psychic structure and the former or speech metaphor to his clinical
WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the owner of the PEP Archive CD and is copyright to the Journal in
which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever.
description of the psychoanalytic situation.
Further illumination of the nature of therapeutic action and of the power of words in the psychoanalytic situation requires that
we more fully differentiate the writing metaphor from the speech metaphor. Such dissection is possible in light of modern
developments in linguistics and reader-response criticism. Freud was unable to complete this task at a time when critical
linguistics was in its infancy.
-5-
Long before The Ego and the Id, Freud struggled with conceptualizing psychical topography. As he moved from the strictly
neurological model, his description of the depth dimension of the mind became increasingly complex. In his 1915 paper, The
Unconscious, Freud speculates about what happens when a psychical idea crosses the boundary of the system Ucs. and enters the
system Cs. (Pcs.). Is it simply retranscribed in a fresh psychical locality, alongside of which the original unconscious registration
continues to exist (p. 174)? Or is there a change in state rather than in place? Is there an economic shift, a hypercathexis of the
originally unconscious idea? Freud concludes with a surprising linguistic solution: Repression represents a failure in translation.
Access to the system Cs. (Pcs.) is determined by the linkage of word with thing. Freud writes,
the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the
unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone. The system Ucs. contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first
and true object-cathexes; the system Pcs. comes about by this thing-presentation being hypercathected through being linked with the
word-presentations corresponding to it. It is these hypercathexes, we may suppose, that bring about a higher psychical organization
and make it possible for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which is dominant in the Pcs. Now, too, we are
in a position to state precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected presentation in the transference neuroses: what it denies
to the presentation is translation into words which shall remain attached to the object. A presentation which is not put into words, or a
psychical act which is not hypercathected, remains thereafter in the Ucs. in a state of repression (emphasis mine) [pp. 201-202].
-6-
Hence, Freud concludes by stressing the economic dimensions of words. A change in state of unconscious things is brought
about through the medium of word-presentations. Unconscious things, which include unconscious thought processes, cannot
reach consciousness by virtue of their own perceptual residues alone because as Freud indicates in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), and restates in The Unconscious (1915), thought processes proceed in the unconscious far from their original perceptual
residues. They need to be reinforced by new qualities by being linked with words, thus hypercathected.
But what is the structure of a word-presentation? Strachey reminds us of Freud's 1891 monograph on aphasia in which Freud
first distinguishes word-presentation from thing-presentation (1915a, p. 214). Here Freud describes a word-presentation as
consisting of a closed complex of multiple imagesreading-, writing-, motor-, and sound-images. But it is only the sound-image
that links the word to its object-presentation.
It is the sound-image of a word-presentation that Freud refers to when he writes of the therapeutic efficacy of the
psychoanalytic situation. Here are some hints of which we take advantage, he says in our therapeutic procedure in order to
undo repressions which have already been effected (1900, p. 617). It is clear from the clinical examples that follow that Freud is
referring to the utterances of the patient that give sound to preconscious word presentations: The girl herself had no notion of the
bearing of her remarks; for if she had, she would never have given voice to them. In this case it had been possible to hoodwink
the censorship into allowing a phantasy which would normally have been kept in the pre-conscious to emerge into consciousness
under the innocent disguise of making a complaint (1900, p. 618). Hence, by 1915, Freud's thinking about the depth dimension
of the mind moves from a topographical writing metaphor of transcription and retranscription (1896) to an energic writing
metaphor of translation, and finally
-7-
to a speech metaphor since word-presentations are indeed connected to sound. The writing metaphor is subsumed in speech. The
latter model seems closer to the clinical context and proceeds naturally from Freud's original scrutiny of his patients' spoken
words in the psychoanalytic situation.1
However, in 1925, the writing metaphor reappears in Freud's work. In A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad, Freud returns
to the topographical problem he first attempted to solve in the Project and raised again in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. How
can neurological tissue and, later, the psychic apparatus be organized so as to account for the continuous freshness of the
perceptual surface and the simultaneously permanent alterations of memory? Such contradictory functioning becomes
understandable in the metaphor of the mystic writing-pad: On the mystic pad the writing vanishes every time the close contact is
broken between the paper which receives the stimulus and the wax slab which preserves the impression. This agrees with a notion
which I have long had about the method in which the perceptual apparatus of our mind functions, but which I have hitherto kept
to myself (p. 231). The contradictory requirements are thus resolved. The layer of celluloid acts as a protective sheath for the
waxed paper underneath; through which the celluloid impressions pass unrecorded until their permanent inscription in the
supplementary wax. Freud says,
I may at this point recall that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I showed that the perceptual apparatus of our mind consists of two
layers, of an external protective shield against
1 Freud states in 1915 that relations between object-presentations form a major part of thought-processes and can best be described by words. Mere perceptions
of these relations produce no qualitative comprehension without the benefit of being linked to words. In the same year, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote Course in
General Linguistics, which became the foundation of modern linguistics. In it, Saussure proposes an idea opposite to Freud's, that spoken and written words
signify meaningfully only because they are themselves part of an inclusive system of relations. More of this later.
-8-
stimuli whose task is to diminish the strength of excitations coming in, and of a surface behind it which receives the stimuli, namely
the system Pcpt.-Cs. I do not think it is too farfetched to compare the celluloid and wax paper cover with the system Pcpt.-Cs. and
its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind them. [1925, pp. 230-231].
The perceptual surface is ever ready to begin its job anew. The succession of layered inscriptions written into the wax all
remain permanently legible in suitable lights.
Jacques Derrida, who has reawakened our interest in the mystic pad as a surprising challenge to positivism's faith in the
cause-and-effect of horizontal linearity, emphasizes the metaphor's dimension of vertical depth (1978): Writing supplements
perception before perception even appears to itself (is conscious of itself). Memory or writing is the opening of that process of
appearance itself. The perceived may be read only in the past, beneath perception and after it (p. 224). This vertical
understanding disrupts the positivistic notion of the continuity of real time. In Derrida's description, the orderly sequencing of
events is replaced by discontinuous transactions through levels:
Temporality as spacing will be not only the horizontal discontinuity of a chain of signs, but also will be writing as the interruption and
restoration of contact between the various depths of psychical levels: the remarkably heterogeneous temporal fabric of psychical work
itself. We find neither the continuity of a line nor the homogeneity of a volume; only the differentiated duration and depth of a stage,
and its spacing [p. 225].
Freud's topographical language is clearer than Derrida's and certainly more familiar:
-9-
It is as though the unconscious stretches out feelers, through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs., towards the external world and
hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it. Thus the interruptions, which in the case of the
Mystic Pad have an external origin, were attributed by my hypothesis to the discontinuity in the current of innervation; and the actual
breaking of contact which occurs in the Mystic Pad was replaced in my theory by the periodic non-excitability of the perceptual
system. I further had a suspicion that this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin
of the concept of time [1925, p. 231].
Freud's clearer language conceals the complexity of psychic depth we once again encounter in this short paper. Time and
memory are not products of any simple linear sequence of cause and effect. Unconscious memory is built up of discontinuous
layerings of written inscriptions.
Derrida reminds us of Freud's neurological model in the Project. There Freud posits two kinds of neurones: permeable ones
offering no resistance to the flow of excitation, and others opposing contactbarriers that necessitate breaching of the
neurological tissue. The first are the vehicles of perception; the second serve as the traces of memory. There, too, memory is
achieved only through the geometric juxtaposition of differences or discontinuities between pathways. Freud (1895) writes, If
we were to suppose that all the contact-barriers were equally well facilitated, or (what is the same thing) offered equal resistance,
then the characteristics of memory would evidently not emerge. We can therefore say still more correctly that memory is
represented by the differences in the facilitations between the neurones (p. 300).
The topographical writing metaphor seems indeed presaged in the neurology of 1895. Moreover, memories are no
- 10 -
simple once-and-for-all-time events. They accumulate in inscriptive complexity upon the mystic pad and even determine their
own structure by a kind of on-off control of the perceptual surface. But this writing apparatus seems to have no immediate affinity
to the clinical psychoanalytic situation. The speech metaphor of 1915 remains the more clinically relevant one since only it
explains the therapeutic efficacy of the psychoanalytic encounter. Both the Project's neurology with its germ of a writing
metaphor and the Mystic Writing-Pad's apparatus with its remembrance of neurologic structure descriptively remain explanations
of psychic structure, but not of the psychoanalytic situation.
3. Narratology and the Psychoanalytic Situation
With recent developments in the psychoanalytic theory of narratology (e.g., Loewald, 1980; Schafer, 1980; Spence, 1982)
and with an understanding of poststructuralist literary criticism (e.g., Derrida, 1967; Culler, 1975), we can at last fruitfully apply
the writing metaphor to the clinical psychoanalytic situation. Paradoxically, the writing metaphor thus becomes a powerful
method for analyzing the oral text of the clinical situation, precisely because the latter temporarily suspends the normal hegemony
of common face-to-face oral discourse. Speech acts exchanged between analyst and analysand slowly accumulate over a long
period of time and approximate the status of an autonomous written text or narrative.
A narrational theory of psychoanalysis joins Freud's early challenges to biographical reductionism. Events are not only
written into the psyche but are narrated as welland in a host of peculiar ways. Events do not tell themselves. The analysand's
reflections on himself and others have recognizable signification only as they are woven into the fabric of idiosyncratic narration.
A three-dimensional narrative space opens between a real event and its surmised meaningfulness. The
- 11 -
body of this article discusses the formal rules that empower this discourse and distinguishes it from other cultural texts.
Schafer has been the most influential psychoanalytic theorist to elaborate the idea of narration in the psychoanalytic situation
(1980). He argues that the analytic life history is a second-order narrative history, and that the first-order history is the analytic
dialogue itself. The narrative structure of the psychoanalytic situation is organized according to the rules of transference and
resistance that control the multiple tellings of life events and hence their meaning. The analyst and analysand collaboratively tell a
second-order narrative that is an alternative to the original, symptomatic one. This alternative narrative is elaborated according to
a very particular grammar that transforms the passive language of neurotic experience into an active responsibility. The validity of
this alternative narrative is not determined by the usual linear criteria of causality but rather by the criteria of the hermeneutic
circle that transcribes an ever-widening scope of coherence, consistency, comprehensiveness, and common sense upon the
telling of the event (p. 53). Schafer argues that even psychoanalytic metapsychology is a kind of narrative that represents a
refinement of plain common sense. Such plain common sense is a taken-for-granted cultural product that provides a storehouse of
consensually acceptable narrative structures which the analytic dialogue will necessarily tap. Freud's metapsychologies can be
reduced to two common-sense stories, the more ancient one being the story of man-as-beast, the other one, more recent and based
on Newtonian physics, being the story of man-as-machine. Schafer argues that these two narrative structures are not necessarily
dictated by the clinical data since alternative narratives can be told by other psychoanalytic theorists, as Melanie Klein and Heinz
Kohut have done.
Schafer views metapsychology not as a rendition of structures in the mind but rather as a selective and thematic organization
of clinical narrative. He believes that the traditional theoretical distinction drawn between structure and content has
- 12 -
inevitably privileged a highly abstracted metapsychology. As Holt (1976), G. Klein (1976), and others agree, this abstraction
distances clinicians from their own experiences and also reduces the complexities of those experiences. In his essay on character
change, Schafer (1979) argues that content and form examined close to the psychoanalytic situation are not clinically exclusive of
one another. When the analyst defines content in the ideational and emotional aspects of action, including action in fantasy, this
distinction collapses (p. 888). Tripartite mechanisms give way to describable actions. The account I favor is this: Character
change is change of action. (p. 889). Schafer develops an action language that he feels is more appropriate to the realities of
the unfolding therapeutic narrative. Action language serves to guide the analyst toward the subtleties of interpretation that
conceptualize the person as agent and not as reactive entity.
Donald Spence also abandons metapsychology for a narrative accounting of the psychoanalytic situation. But Spence
questions the capacity of language to truthfully reflect experience. Dreams, memories, and experiences are by and large visual
phenomena that are only inadequately translated by language. Language is structurally determined only to select aspects of this
complex field. There is an inevitable slippage between visual image and verbal description (p. 122). Moreover, language acts in
the service of narrative closure. Free association and evenly hovering attention are not virtuous and supplementary routes toward
historical truth. Indeed, the relationship between the associative stance of the patient and the listening stance of the analyst
becomes organized in a complementary manner so as to produce a coherent narrative. Narrative reality replaces psychic reality.
Spence examines the fragility of memory as it is described in language in the psychoanalytic situation:
Once [the isolated events of a patient's life] have been elaborated or otherwise adjusted to fit the larger frame, it is
- 13 -
almost impossible to go back to their original innocent, unformed state. A good fit of memory with narrative is often applauded but
perhaps for the wrong reasons; it may not suggest a successful recovery of an infantile experience but, rather, a gradual (and
unwitting) distortion in line with expectations. We have no way of determining which newly recalled memory is truly a report of the
past and which is the consequence of ongoing narrative pressure [p. 123].
Spence remains skeptical of narrative's ability to say anything historically truthful. The present narrative truth replaces
historical truth. Therefore, despite Glover's appeal, all interpretations are inexact; yet interpretations work. They have a certain
compelling quality in the face of obvious errors of reasoning and judgment (p. 163). Narrative closure conceals history but
nevertheless acts powerfully in the psychoanalytic situation to produce change. Language is an instrument of persuasion to which
analyst and patient ultimately succumb in their attempts to influence and to understand each other. Because of its aesthetic and
pragmatic functions, language finally persuades both participants. Interpretation is a creative act. Through its phrasing and timing,
interpretation persuades by its appeal to aesthetic experience. (One is reminded of Mahony's thesis [1982] that Freud's impact is
more a function of his skillfulness as a writer than his truthfulness as a natural scientist.) Furthermore, an interpretation is a
pragmatic propositional statement that is a means to an end, therefore neither true nor false. Spence explains, It is uttered in
the expectation that it will lead to additional, clarifying clinical material (p. 271). He continues, Put another way, we would say
that the analyst commits himself to a belief in his formulation but not necessarily to a belief in its referent (p. 273). Narrative is
powerful in the psychoanalytic situation but it is not powerful enough to convince a third party. For that task, the analyst must
gloss his
- 14 -
interpretive interventions; he must contextualize those interventions in such a way that a third party can understand the clinical
encounter as fully as he does.
Clearly for Schafer, language is friendlier. It is an active companion and a truthfully transparent representative of the person
as agent. Language says what it means; it is ingenuous. For Spence, language is ingenious. What remains innocent is only the
historical experience. Truth value is hostage to its explanatory success (p. 143).
Schafer and Spence both focus on the exchange of oral utterances between patient and analyst. This is a natural focus since
psychoanalytic narrative is obviously grounded in speech. Therapeutic action occurs in the immediate vicinity of the spoken
formal interpretation. Schafer concentrates on what is said (verbs and adverbs vs. nouns and adjectives). Spence concentrates on
how it is said. What precedes the formal interpretation is preparatory ground for the spoken figure. For Spence, this ground is
tilled with silent, unwitting, uncorrected ideas that can be potentially obfuscating and confusing.
This ground, although indeed being preparatory for the formal interpretation, is also the essential text that empowers
therapeutic change by resisting, postponing, and deferring narrative closure at the same time that it pushes both participants
toward interpretation. This text emerges from within the asymmetrical exchange of speech utterances in the psychoanalytic
situation. It is a text and not a conversation because it operates as if it were written free of authorial intention. Therefore, it is not
simply transcribed conversation. It is free as well from the rules of conversational constraint. Rather than confusing and
obfuscating, this written text opens upon a plenitude of meaning. To further understand how this occurs, we transplant Freud's
writing metaphor from the mind to the scene of action in the psychoanalytic narrative.
- 15 -
4. Poetics and Reader-Response Criticism

Before pursuing textual aspects of the psychoanalytic narrative, it is necessary to outline some key concepts introduced by
the specific branch of literary criticism called poetics and to elaborate, in turn, its foundation in the phonological revolution of
modern linguistic theory described later. Without some grounding in the formal coordinates of this structuralist and
poststructuralist poetics, one can too easily miss the formal coordinates of the psychoanalytic narrative structure or prematurely
reduce them to psychoanalytic rules of transference and resistance. One of the purposes of this article is to do just the opposite, to
bring the formalist thinking of poetics to bear upon the significations of psychoanalytic narrative.
Poetics is not concerned with interpretive literary exegesis. It is not hermeneutic in the sense that it is not primarily the search
for the meaning complex of a particular work of poetry or prose. Ultimately, it may not even be about literature. Rather, it is about
the conditions that generate meaning. Its object is not literature per se but rather, as Roman Jakobson has said, literariness, the
conditions that make a given work a literary work. Tzvetan Todorov has traced this tradition to the Russian Formalists of the
1920s (1981). He defines the modern goal of poetic study as no longer to articulate a paraphrase, a descriptive rsum of the
concrete work, but to propose a theory of the structure and functioning of literary discourse, a theory that affords a list of literary
possibilities, so that existing literary works appear achieved particular cases. The particular text will be only an instance that
allows us to describe the properties of literature (p. 7). These properties will be found not in psychology or in sociology but
within literature itself.
Jonathan Culler expands the definition of poetics to include and highlight a theory of readership or of literary competence
(1975). The intelligibility of a work, its recognition as being literary or nonliterary, is dependent upon a shared set of conventions
about what makes coherent sense within the
- 16 -
institution of literature. Reading, in other words, is not an innocent activity. Readers may not agree on a particular interpretation
of a given text, but all competent readers, including authors, will be guided by the same formal conventions that delimit the
acceptable ways of reading on the path to interpretation. For example, according to Culler, the experience of reading poetry
leads to implicit recognition of the importance of binary oppositions as thematic devices: in interpreting a poem one looks for
terms which can be placed on a semantic or thematic axis and opposed to one another (p. 126). The particular terms of the
tension generated by these oppositions and their resolution will determine the content of interpretation.
What emerges in poetics then is a critical distinction between a formal system of structuring conventions that valorize and
signify, for example, a deep narrative structure or grammar, and an almost infinite set of potential utterancesfor example,
psychoanalytic life events or stories that manifest such signifying conventions.
5. The Phonological Revolution of Modern Linguistics

The distinction between form and content in poetics rests upon the phonological revolution of modern linguistics first
elaborated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his 1915 posthumous work, Course in General Linguistics, and later by
the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Both Saussure and Pierce ultimately subsumed linguistics under the general
science of the sign, semiology. In language, Saussure said, there are only differences without positive terms. As in mathematics, a
point has no inherent meaning. Its meaning emerges only in relationship to other points, whose membership within a gestalt or set
will be ultimately determined by a boundary that is more or less arbitrarily drawn. A system of relations determines meaning.
Again the assumptions of positivism are
- 17 -
challenged. An event, a mathematical point, a phoneme, a morpheme, a lexeme, a sentence, or the like is not ultimately linked to
its neighbor in a chain of cause and effect but rather in a matrix of differentiality. This particular form of organized complexity
became an essential assumption of the General Systems Theory of the 1950s (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; Bertalanffy, 1968).
Gregory Bateson (1972) calls this the difference that makes a difference. In the 1960s, Rosenblatt, Thickstun, and others
offered this assumption as an alternative to the power concepts of drive theory in psychoanalytic metapsychology, but oddly
within a positivistic framework.
The system of relations in language is distributed on levels and between levels. Relations on the same level are ordered
according to two poles: the syntagmatic or sequential, guided by horizontal rules of actual combination of co-present units
roughly equivalent to the Markov chains of Information Theory; and the paradigmatic or substitutive, guided by vertical rules of
potential selection of units more significant by their absence. Jakobson in 1956 described two kinds of aphasia, metaphoric and
metonymic, as clinical functions of these two poles. In addition, relations in language are manifested between levels, one level
determining the organization of the next higher onephonemes into morphemes, and so on. Culler gives an example:
Consider the word bed. The identity of its various phonetic manifestations depends, first of all, on the difference between its
phonological structure and those of bread, bled, bend, abed, deb. Moreover, the phonemes which compose it are themselves sets of
differential features: the vowel may be uttered in various ways so long as it is distinguished from that of bad, bud, bid, bade; and the
consonants must be differentiated from those of bet, beg, bell, fed, led, red, wed, etc. At another level, bed is defined by its relations to
other words; those which contrast with it, in that they could replace it in various contexts (table, chair, floor, ground, etc.),
- 18 -
and those with which it can combine in a sequence (the, a, soft, is, low, occupied, etc.). Finally it is related to higher-level
constituents: it can serve as the head of a noun phrase, as the subject or object of a sentence [1975, p. 12].
Such systems of relations and differences constitute the underlying structure of language, a structure that Saussure calls the
Langue and which is the proper object of linguistic investigation. Parole, on the other hand, the actual utterances of speech or
those recorded in writing, are merely superficial structures, manifestations of the underlying system. Cultural context and
communicative circuitry determine which combinations and substitutions are either acceptable or significant. Not all phonological
possibilities are recognized in a given language. Moreover, one can apply this formal understanding to any material function or
sign that is invested with social meaning (semiology). For instance, Roland Barthes (1967) has studied fashion styles. Claude
Lvi-Strauss (1964) has studied cross-cultural cooking practices.
This kind of linguistic analysis has greatly informed poetic research since literary texts are conceived in language. What
appears as natural, taken-for-granted sense, or, for that matter, nonsense, must be determined by underlying abstract structures of
relation, difference, and opposition. But, as Culler warns (1975), the paths of poetic theory are strewn with the bones of
meaningless distinctions deductively derived by theorists who simply model their analyses according to the formal properties of
sentence structure. For example, Propp (1970) reduced 100 Russian fairy tales to 31 arbitrary functions. As Culler notes,
Linguistics does not provide a discovery procedure, which if followed in automatic fashion, will yield correct results (p. 31).
What keeps us honest is always a reference back to a stated set of effects on the reader. Distinctions can always be arbitrarily
discovered or assigned, but according to Culler pertinent distinctions must refer back to the conventions of narrative structure that
readers have unknowingly assimilated:
- 19 -
Both author and reader bring to the text more than a knowledge of language and this additional experienceexpectations about the
forms of literary organization, implicit models of literary structures, practice in forming and testing hypotheses about literary
worksis what guides one in the perception and construction of relevant patterns. To discover the nature and forms of this
supplementary knowledge is the task of poetics [p. 95].
6. Intertextuality and the Activation of Interpretive Operations

It is the content and form of this supplementary knowledge that readers knowingly and unknowingly bring to a narrative text
which determine the interpretive operations they will perform. These interpretive operations generate a sense of meaning, a
coherence, an impact, and a sense of completion that are aspects of the inclusive hermeneutic circle. The truth question that is
central to the organization of positivistic scientific discourse is irrelevant to the organization of literary discourse. A narrative is
not a simple transcription of an elusive reality. Rather, like the memory function Freud describes, it is a re-transcription requiring
the very active participation of the reader. In the psychoanalytic situation the role of reader is shared by both analysand and
analyst. Life events are told, interpreted, and reinterpreted according to operations that are generic to the successfully read
narrative. Certain interpretive operations and strategies are inevitable given the internal formal structures of narration and are
inevitable given the historical and cultural external determinants of supplementary knowledge that ultimately situate a text's
coherence in relation to other texts, its intertextuality. To say that the psychoanalytic narrative is only organized according to the
grammar of transference and resistance is not to give enough recognition to the powerful structuring impact of narration's formal
constitution that situates it in a context of other cultural texts on both syntagmatic
- 20 -
and paradigmatic axes. The psychoanalytic narrative is a special category of narrative the form of which needs to be examined in
greater detail.
A narrative text's capacity to be interpreted by a competent readership or interpretive community, whatever the specific
interpretation, is determined by its recognizable referents to other texts that are clearly acceptable and already intelligible to the
community. These other deciphered texts make up the content of supplementary knowledge. A narrative's capacity to reflect these
texts is its verisimilitude. In the theory of structural poetics, this vraisemblablisation goes by other names as well:
recuperation, naturalization, and motivation. These terms signify everything about or in a text that situates that text in a
discursive process which immediately assimilates it to what appears to be the natural order of things. A text is distinguished
within this essentially conservatorial matrix. Culler outlines five levels of verisimilitude that overlap but can be distinguished: the
real, the cultural, the generic, the conventionally natural, and the parody (1975).
The first level, the real, refers to those aspects of a text that require absolutely no justification, and, in fact, are not even
recognized as textual. If someone starts laughing, it is taken for granted that he will stop. A reader will naturally assume such a
termination if the story does not. If the story violates this termination, then the reader will contextualize this event and order it
within the realm of the imaginable fantastic. In any case, the reader is forced to naturalize, to perform an interpretive operation.
Any grammatical sentence operates ultimately on this level. An example is, John is sad.
The second level, the cultural, refers to stereotypes that the culture will recognize as sucha collection of world views and
ethical positions. The following sentence from Balzac employs these two levels of verisimilitude. The Count of Lanty was small,
ugly and pock-marked, as gloomy as a Spaniard and as boring as a banker. The adjectives are taken-for-granted qualities
attributable to humans; the cultural stereotypes are recognized
- 21 -
as such by any reader of that time. Culler writes, Most literary effects, particularly in narrative prose, depend on the fact that
readers will try to relate what the text tells them to a level of ordinary human concerns, to the actions and reactions of characters
constructed in accordance with models of integrity and coherence (1975, p. 144). We might call this the ideology of the times. I
believe that when Schafer speaks of refined common sense as the storehouse for alternative narratives elicited in the
psychoanalytic situation, he is operating on this second level of verisimilitude, the level that Todorov (1981) calls, public
opinion (p. 19).
The third level, that of genre, refers to the literary conventions which form the context of understanding. A certain range of
acceptable plots will be expected in comedy, whereas a different range is expected in tragedy. When the text produces something
unexpected, the reader will seek to naturalize the unfamiliar in particular interpretive ways. Most often, such a contextualization
proceeds by clothing the narrator. For example, the strangest text can always be understood as the creation of a delirious narrator.
The fourth and fifth levels of verisimilitude refer to the self-reflexive qualities of literary narrative that help establish its
intelligibility. This self-reflection takes many forms, in which the author empowers himself by calling attention to himself or his
technique in such a way that the reader is forced to acknowledge the author's authority. For example, in Diderot's Jacques le
Fataliste, the narrator says, What prevents me from having the master marry and be cuckolded, from sending Jacques off to the
colonies? What prevents me from producing a violent quarrel between these three characters? It depends only on me to make you
wait a year, two years, three years, for the study of Jacques' loves, by separating him from his master and making each meet with
whatever accidents take my fancy. This kind of quasi-parody gives way to the fifth level of actual parody. The difference is that
actual parody paradoxically stands by itself as an autonomous work dependent upon the
- 22 -
existence of an antecedent text to which it refers and yet from which, at the same time, it stands apart.
The idea that Schafer has introduced, of a fundamental transformation of commonsense narrative structures through the
conceptual and formal conventions of the psychoanalytic situation into a comprehensive distillate, becomes an especially
powerful idea when it is examined more closely from the perspectives outlined previously. According to Schafer, the cultural
repositories of plain common sense include mythology, folk wisdom, colloquial sayings, jokes, and literature (we should add
television, movies, radio, magazines, and the like); he points out that, as Freud showed repeatedly, there are relatively few
significant psychoanalytic propositions that are not stated or implied by these products (1980, p. 31). But Schafer cautions that
common sense is not fixed. Internal tension and ambiguity characterize these cultural repositories. For every maxim, for
example, there is a countermaxim. As formal structures, these statements are not opposed; only their content is. A penny saved is
a penny earned, but one may be penny-wise and pound-foolish; one should look before one leaps, but he who hesitates is
lost, and so on. It is because of the ambiguity and inherent uncertainty in these sources of controversial intelligibility that
psychoanalysis is able to signify, first, by selection and schematic reduction of its tensions and ambiguities and, second, by
elevating only some of these factors (such as pleasure versus reality and id versus ego) to the status of overarching principles and
structures (p. 31).
We have discovered by further examining the complexities of textual verisimilitude that these cultural functions are only
operative on one level, though traditionally an important one. For example, even the syntax of a simple declarative sentence, such
as John is sad, contributes to the overall narrative's recognizability as belonging to the category of common human discourse.
Not only the content of the story but also its formal syntactic presentation, its plot structure, the presence of characteristic and
ideologically secure narrative personae, and the
- 23 -
like determine its intertextual significance. Moreover, when immediate recognition is absent or temporarily postponed, narration
acts powerfully upon the reader to perform interpretive operations that will eventually contextualize it. The reader looking for
coherence will rethrow the hermeneutic net in ever-widening circles until satisfactory coherence is attained, until what is initially
unfamiliar and strange is made familiar and natural, perhaps until nonmeaning is replaced by sense.
The demands of such interpretive work are reminiscent of Freud's early definition of instinctual pressure in Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes: By the pressure of an instinct we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the
demand for work which it represents (1915, p. 122). Traditionally, in economic metapsychology this demand has been
elaborated as a biologically quantitative force rather than as an intertextual potential, a difference that makes a difference, a
space or moment of uncertainty bridged by an act of interpretation. Such spaces of uncertainty allow and in fact demand that the
interpreter be creative in his encounter with a text. Todorov, in his analysis of the genre of the fantastic, explores Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw as demanding this kind of creation (1970). The reader is continually forced into uncertainty. Is the strange
story ultimately explainable through naturalistic formulas or is it explicitly supernatural? The reader is tempted to turn to one
explanation and then to the other. If the reader remains in the middle, he will create and recognize a new genre, the fantastic. We
begin to see then that the uncertainties and ambiguities that Schafer points to in the repositories of common sense are not simply a
product of dissonant contents but are a product of language itself, and of the nature of literariness, and also function as primary
motivation for acts of creative synthesis.
7. The Psychoanalytic Situation: on the Transformational Axis Between Writing and

Speech: Postponing Interpretation
We postulate that psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic situation act not primarily by the immediate reduction of this
- 24 -
intertextual potential but rather by postponing its distillation, by widening the space of uncertainty, and by foregrounding what is
normally a background to any reading of any text. The analysand and analyst are forced conjointly to postpone their naturalizing
function and to suspend themselves in the uncertain space of creative demand. The psychoanalytic situation promotes a narrative
structuring that activates interpretive operations because it uniquely empowers what has been called the fundamental paradox of
literature, the confrontation between speech and writing present as was described earlier in Freud's description of the mind.
Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential of the so-called poststructuralist thinkers, has differentiated these two
phenomena as part of his project to uncover the massive logocentrism of Western culture ubiquitous in commonsense attitudes, in
all of philosophy and even in structuralism itself (1967). By logocentrism, Derrida means that metaphysics of presence which
idealizes notions of ultimate truths or realities, gods, or grammars, upon whose immediate presence and graspability whole
systems of search are dependent. In the logocentric model then, textual interpretation becomes a recovery operation, a restoration
of original meaningfor example, what it was that the author really had in mind, consciously or unconsciously. Structural
linguistics, having given up authorial intention as a relevant object of research, has substituted for it the investigation of
underlying structures, the langue. Nietzsche (1889) says it earlier: I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in
grammar. Derrida further argues that we have continued to succumb to this metaphysics of presence by treating the written
text as if it were simply the record of a spoken text, and hence immediately present and knowable. Instead, Derrida (1972) argues
that writing is independent of the oral circuit of communication. It is not ordinary speech. It is an inscription that has an
autonomous graphic organizing power:
To write is to produce a mark which constitutes in its turn
- 25 -
a kind of productive mechanism, which my absence will not, as a matter of principle, prevent from functioning and provoking reading,
from yielding itself up to reading and rewriting. For writing to be writing it must continue to act and be readable even if what we
call the author of the writing be provisionally absent or no longer uphold what he has written, what he appears to have signed. The
situation of the writer or underwriter is with respect to the writing, fundamentally the same as that of the reader. This essential drift,
which is proper to writing as a structure of repetition, a structure cut off from any absolute responsibility or from consciousness as
ultimate authority, orphaned and separated since birth from the support of the father, is indeed what Plato condemned in the
Phaedrus [p. 376].
As an orphan, the written text is freed from convention. It can enjoy the free play of the signifier detached from its signified
and not be reducible to any conventional semiotic system, or at least it can postpone such an anchorage. As Culler writes (1975),
Writing involves a differance, which Derrida spells with an a to highlight the difference perceptible only within the written
language and to emphasize the relation between difference and deferment. The written word is an object in its own right: different
from meanings which it defers in a play of differences (p. 133).
Unlike the written text, the circuit of oral communication, through which speech patterns are routed, is indeed organized
between sender and receiver and back again according to teleonomic principles of feedback and control. As Birdwhistell (1970),
Bateson (1972), Scheflen (1973), and others have described, oral communication including verbal utterances and nonverbal
qualifiers enacted between people speaks more about relationships between people than about the actual exchange of information.
It enables additional functions such as the determination and maintenance of mutually encoded hierarchical
- 26 -
patterns of domination and submission between receiver and sender. Subtle cues and signals are exchanged between them that
maintain these hierarchical patterns within socially acceptable limits. Language plays a nonexclusive role in this circuitry as
indicated by Jakobsons's observation (1962) that language always fulfills at least one of six possible communicative functions: the
referential, the emotive, the phatic, the conative, the metalingual, or the poetic. The written text, on the other hand, is freed from
the constraints of this communicative circuitry and can operate at a distance from any ethological niche.
Derrida's radical differentiation of writing from speech is helpful in understanding the narrative power of the psychoanalytic
situation if we are careful to remember that in our culture the written text does serve a conservatorial function as well. But it is the
written text's initial inscriptive strangeness, so different from oral speech, that generates the reader's motivation to decipher it with
the aid of the complex levels of supplementary knowledge already described. This motivation is generated by the need to
assimilate the initially strange into the intelligible, a move toward inevitable correspondence with the conventional and back into
the oral circuit of communication.
The psychoanalytic situation functions by more or less alternately removing its analyst and analysand participants from and
then restoring them back into the oral circuit of communication. The first movement necessarily implies the second.
Psychoanalytic discourse is at the very least a series and sequencing of oral speech acts. Dreams and other internal musings are
only recognized as they are elaborated through speech. The normal functioning of the communicative oral circuit is continuously
disrupted by the formal structures of the anonymous analyst, the reclining analysand, and by the technical practices of the free
associative injunction and the selective valence given to certain speech acts organized around transference and resistance. More
and more, the analytic discourse approaches the inscriptive strangeness and autonomous monumentality
- 27 -
of the written text as described by Derrida. Events in the analysis, speech acts and performances, accumulate over time as waxed
inscriptions do, continuously read and rewritten in the present free play of signifiers begging for demystification and
naturalization in terms of the knowable, in terms of same conventional text, begging for an interpretation, a return to the
communicative circuit. The Mystic Writing-Pad now becomes not only a model of the mind but also a model of the
psychoanalytic situation.
A 32-year-old man came into treatment shortly following the death of his father in an automobile crash, an event briefly
preceding the patient's promotion at work. The patient's initial symptoms included agoraphobic anxiety and catastrophic work
inhibition that prevented him from speaking in front of a large group. The anxiety was of acute onset. The patient could remember
exactly when it occurred while he was driving to work one morning. What was striking about this man's initial presentation was
that he had absolutely no recall of his childhood. He was visibly shaken with anger when I first asked him to share any childhood
memories. In the course of treatment, the patient became justifiably suspicious that his father's death had been a suicide and that
the double-indemnity insurance he had collected was therefore fraudulent. The patient safely deposited the insurance payment
into a certificate that he refused to spend. For a large portion of his first year of treatment he was away from sessions, often not
calling. Yet he remained seriously engaged in the treatment. He insisted on paying for his sessions out of his own funds even
though a substantial amount of the fees would have been covered by his firm. After examining my own guilt for collecting fees
from an absent patient, I realized my role as proxy for this man's guilt. I had become the one who was collecting blood money.
This interpretation led to the patient's reassuming attendance at sessions.
Toward the end of his first year of treatment, the patient reported a memory he had of himself at the age of 14, which marked
the moment of onset of his childhood amnesia. He was
- 28 -
babysitting for friends of his parents. He remembered crossing the street the next morning toward his own house and suddenly he
felt the memory of the night before slipping away from him. Immediately after that incident, he realized he had lost all memory of
his childhood. Both the patient and I were drawn to the mysterious events of the night before. After the session, the patient
entered a cab in front of my office and thought the words: Don't tell anyone, Janet! These mysterious words easily found
inclusion in the narrative since Janet was the name of the little girl for whom the patient had been babysitting. Cohesive narrative
called for an interpretation that might reconstruct some sort of sexual behavior between the young adolescent and his
8-year-old-girl charge the memory of which was repressed the next morning. The patient and I came to believe that sexual activity
had occurred that evening, not between the youngsters, but between the patient's father and the little girl's mother! This affair was
confirmed later in treatment by discovered evidence the patient had suppressed at the time of his father's death: the presence of an
illegitimate child whom the father had been secretly supporting all those years. But this was not to be the end of the meanings of
this mysterious text, Don't tell anyone, Janet! The text overflowed with meaning, and would not remain quiescent, even within
the bounds of these constructions. The patient remained much more certain than I about their veracity. I became suspicious of his
certainty although there could not be any question of the father's affair, as it had subsequently been confirmed by numerous
independent sources after its reconstruction in treatment.
The patient had always been fearful of treatment, fearful of discovering something terrible about himself. There was always
an air of mystery, a sense of something yet further to explore, something the patient was not telling. Things were too neat, too
cohesive. Several years of working through the complexities of rageful oedipal fantasies yielded considerable relaxation of
aggressive conflicts at work and in intimate relationships. The patient's loving feelings toward me began to
- 29 -
emerge. The patient attempted to anchor those feelings and fantasies in the normalizing context of everyday speech between
friends. He began to use our first names in whatever message he would need to leave on my answering machine. Now, five years
after treatment had begun, Don't tell anyone, Janet! became Don't tell anyone, Bob! as the patient recounted three
homosexual encounters he had had at the age of fourteen. He also remembered at the beginning of treatment, walking to my
office and imagining multiple large penises in the street and the taste of one in his mouth. He had been afraid to mention it then.
The patient has recently felt some fear of homosexual attack by a close friend of his, and has had almost paranoid fantasies of his
wife having affairs.
What this case review offers, is a concrete piece of text (Don't tell anyone, Janet!) which may or may not have existed at
one time as an actual piece of conversation. This text, perhaps in part because of its conversational similitude, perhaps in part
because of its appearance so cohesively in the narrative, begged for interpretive closure. But at the same time because it was
uttered in the psychoanalytic situation, the text could resist anchorage and open up further meanings, even in the face of
confirmations of historical accuracy.
Such texts exist in every successful psychoanalysis, although not necessarily appearing in such a startling concrete form. The
text usually emerges between the patient's spoken utterances. An insightful patient once said, remarking on how difficult doing
psychoanalysis must be: It's like reading a poem but not being able to refer back to it because its been said. Psychoanalysis
empowers meaning as the mystic writing-pad does, through its self-erasure. The text is written and rewritten with increasing
inscriptive complexity and takes on a monumentality of its own that cannot be found in any particular place.
The following is a familiar piece of psychoanalytic narrative that occurred early in treatment in which another patient and I
are struggling to move down the transformational axis from speech to text.
- 30 -
P: Found my wallet. It was in another coat. Sixty dollars in it. A nice Christmas present. I should carry my cash
separately, so I don't lose the whole shmear. I've lost my wallet a number of times. I should tape it on. My girl friend was
pick-pocketed once. I was thinking: my sessions are too controlled by me. I don't let my mind just golike a jazz
improvisation.
A: I think you're afraid to let that happen.
P: My biggest fear is that I'll just go off on a tangent. Not that it'll be weird, just incoherent.
A: What's your concern?
P: That it will sound too literary. I know I can associate well. Alright! I'm going to do it! Here's the green light, even if
it's weeks before it makes sense. Well, here I go obsessively backwards. I'm afraid I'll just talk about a book or
something. OK! The first thing I thought of when I got on the couch was
8. The Linear Seductions of Narrative

This back-and-forth movement from speech to writing to speech again is not to be mistaken, as it frequently is, by beginning
analysands as a search for some secret, or for some single and ultimate meaning. To find sense in a text is to discover a multitude
of meanings. What Culler writes about making sense of literature is equally true of the analytic narration: The attempt to
understand how we make sense of a text leads one to think of literature not as representation or communication but as a series of
forms which comply with and resist the production of meaning (1975, p. 259). Or as Roland Barthes writes, the work is like an
onion, a construction of layers (or levels, or systems) whose body contains, finally no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible
principle, nothing except the infinity of its own envelopeswhich envelop nothing other than the unity of its own surfaces
(1971, p. 10). Hans Sachs has said
- 31 -
that an analysis terminates when the patient realizes it could go on forever.

The fundamental paradox of literature therefore places the unfolding psychoanalytic narrative somewhere on the
transformational axis between writing and speech. It is here where imaginative reading and interpretation exercise their
remarkable effects, especially remarkable given the conventional intertextual matrix from which narrative assumes its
recognizability within the multiple exchange systems of human discourse. Even the positivistic privileging of an event in a chain
of cause-and-effect will find its ecological niche in this matrix. Narration necessitates a linear sequencing of lexical items and plot
development. We read English from left to right. An unconscious assumption in the temporal order of the narrative genre is the
notion of causality. Sequence implies consequence. If the queen's death follows the king's, it is natural to assume that she died of
grief (Torodov, 1981, p. 42). It is no wonder that the beginning analysand will expect through his narrative to discover an
ultimate secret or primal meaning. Roland Barthes writes, Indeed, there is a strong presumption that the mainspring of the
narrative activity is to be traced to that very confusion between consecutiveness and consequence, what-comes-after being read in
a narrative as what-is-caused -by. Narrative could then be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by
scholasticism under the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc (1977, p. 94). Or as Spence points out, narrative is infinitely
elastic. One reason for this almost embarrassing flexibility stems from the fact that narratives depend, as we have seen, rather
heavily on chronology. The syntax of the narrative can be represented in the form and then and then and then. Given
this loose syntax, it becomes easy to insert a wide range of happenings at any particular point in the story (1982, p. 182). In the
clinical example described earlier, the patient was easily amenable to insert Don't tell anyone, Janet! into the unfolding
narrative of his father's unfaithfulness and betrayal.
- 32 -
Yet the imaginative force of a narrative is not derived from the orderly sequence of the story's events independent of their
interpretation. Every text requires a double logic. Once again the Wolf Man is an example. First there is the eventful story, and
then there is the reconstruction of an uncertain event. The second act, that of reconstruction, is logically determined by the
narrative demand for meaningful coherence. But the reality of this event is ultimately undecidable. Culler submits the Oedipus
story to a similar deconstruction (1981). The prior event of Laius's murder assigns guilt to Oedipus only because of the
convergence of meaning in the narrative discourse. The actual proof of Oedipus' guilt is never presented or even asked for by
Oedipus himself. The eyewitness account of whether Laius was murdered by one or by a group is never revealed. It is assumed
that the murder was by one alone, and hence by Oedipus. His tragic heroism is demanded by the narrative logic in its
reconstructive return: One logic assumes the primacy of events; the other treats the events as the products of meanings (p. 178).
By one logic, Oedipus may have been innocent! By the other, he almost certainly was guilty. It is impossible to resolve the
tension between these two logics. Both together contribute to the narrative impact. Neither is reducible to the other.
9. What is an Author?
The choice of poetic theory is critical in determining the analyst's perspective on therapeutic action in the psychoanalytic
situation. The analyst must choose in a fundamental way and situate himself either within what Schafer (1979) describes as the
persistent and unquestioned naive empiricist or positivist attitudes or within the more sophisticated epistemological conceptions
that are available today (p. 868).
The tension between these discontinuous levels of understanding is present not only in contemporary debate in
psychoanalytic theory but also in every contemporary mode of human understanding. For example, Culler has cogently drawn
- 33 -
the boundaries between these two levels in literary understanding and has gathered together contemporary structuralist and
poststructuralist positions in his important work Structuralist Poetics. Decentering the existential subject from the humanist gaze
is the preoccupying project of these latter positions. Foucault's answer to the question What is an author is summarized by
Culler (1975):
The unit of the author, far from being given a priori, is always constituted by particular operations. Indeed, even in the case of a
simple work, how could the author be its source? He wrote it, certainly; he composed it; but he can write poetry, or history, or
criticism only within the context of a system of enabling conventions which constitute and delimit the varieties of discourse [p. 30].
This systematic approach to the conventions and operations of literariness makes accessing authorial intention an
unimportant search. Culler continues:
To say that a poem becomes an autonomous object once it leaves the author's pen is, in one sense, precisely the reverse of the
structuralist position. The poem cannot be created except in relation to other poems and conventions of reading. If its meaning
changes later on, that is because it enters new relations with later texts: new works which modify the literary system itself [p. 30].
Spence (1982) takes precisely this reverse position in his approach to authorship. He measures literary success by how well
the author has made his work accessible. If the author is successful, then the reader will recapture the author's original view
(p. 40). Therefore, Henry Adams is less skillful than William James because Adams has not controlled the background
associations through which we read the passage. Because we read it with a different set of assumptions and
- 34 -
associations, we experience a radically different text. Much of its strange flavor is a direct result of the failure to provide the
reader with an adequate context (p. 47). Spence ties the knot when he adds that the problems of the critical reader are the parallel
problems of the analyst.
Spence ties the search for authorial intention onto the twin tasks of the analyst to guide his patient and to convince the
scientific community. The analyst must guide the patient back to the scenes of original experience and help the patient describe
those scenes more precisely. The inaccuracies of the original experience are not the result of the anxieties of the dangerous
situation but rather of its pictorial character and the fact that pictures do not change easily into words (pp. 63-64). Spence
writes: If the perennial conflict facing the patient is between what is true and what is describable, we can arrive at a new
definition of the task of the analyst: to provide whatever conditions are necessary to allow the patient to feel safe enough to risk
the impossible and to describe what he really sees (p. 62). But as justifiable and certain as the context of discovery may be to the
analyst and his patient in the psychoanalytic situation, it is not justifiable enough to the scientific community at large. The authors
of the psychoanalytic narrative must make themselves known. Because the spoken interchange is only a small part of any clinical
episode (p. 216), simply reporting these exchanges will not convince a third party, even a sympathetic one. Without the full
context, the meaning of any interchange is indeterminate and can never be fully reconstructed (p. 216). Naturalization of the
interchange (and here, Spence is borrowing the term naturalization from Culler) must be consciously and deliberately applied.
This essential glossing operation will put the data of the psychoanalytic session on a par with the data of the observable world
(p. 246). The interpretive interventions of the analyst now become falsifiable on the basis of a full understanding of all the data
available to the analyst and his third party. If naturalization is truly possible, then each and every analytic hour is available for
- 35 -
public examination and we have the makings of a science of the mind. Otherwise, Spence warns, we must resign ourselves to a
literature of fads and fashions, to a cyclical rather than a cumulative development of ideas, and to a field in which opinion looms
larger than evidence (p. 253).
Spence's search for authorship has reinstated the archeological model of psychoanalysis, the very model of which he
condemns Freud's use. Spence returns to a search for original presence, for original experience, and for original vision whether
belonging to the patient or to the analyst. Spence adopts a version of the metaphysics of presence and commits the logocentric
error that Derrida uncovers in Western philosophy and which reveals itself in the assimilation of writing to speech. Culler
(1975) explains:
Interpretation, on this model, is a matter of making present what is absent, of restoring an original presence which is the source and
truth of the form in question. The tendency is thus to treat a text as if it were spoken and try to move through the words to recover the
meaning which was present in the speaker's mind at the moment of utterance, to determine what the speaker, in that revealing phrase,
had in mind [p. 132].
Since Spence is in search of original meaning, he hears psychoanalytical conversation between patient and analyst as
powerful in that it often determines idiosyncratic and confused versions of reality and crippled in that it does not allow for the
kinds of corrective feedback that in normal conversation keeps both participants on a consensual track. Spence focuses on the
process of exchanged speech utterances. Therefore, he does not see the emerging text and cannot focus on its empowering
maieutic presence. He does not hear the crippled conversation that silences speech and underlines the plenitude of meaning that is
nascent in the text. As Ricoeur writes (and Spence quotes him): We interpolate explanation when the narrative process
- 36 -
is blocked and in order to follow further. These explanations are acceptable to the extent that they may be grafted upon the
archetypes of story telling which have been culturally developed and which rule our actual competence to follow new stories
(1977, p. 869). In the structuralist position the written word's independence is what constitutes literature and literariness.
Culler continues (1975):
The meaning of a sentence, one might say, is not a form or an essence, present at the moment of its production and lying behind it as a
truth to be discovered, but the series of developments to which it gives rise, as determined by past and future relations between words
and the conventions of semiotic systems. Some texts are more orphaned than others because the conventions of reading are not so
firm as to provide a stepfather. But literature, foregrounding the text itself, gives freer play to the essential drift and autonomous
productivity of language [pp. 132-133].
Spence (1982) continues to subsume writing to speech. He claims it is only the native tongue of reality that can return
writing to its asymptotic relationship to truth: Language is both too rich and too poor to represent experience adequately. In the
act of writing, the author is producing a complicated translation of the text of the world; we generate a second text in our
attempt to return to the native tongue of reality. If we are lucky in our explication, we may recover the original text (p. 51).
Through the conscious application of naturalization, Spence would have us reduce the psychoanalytic text to singular
meanings that can be consensually validated. In contrast, Culler's description of the multiple forms of naturalization summarized
earlier situates a text in a system in which a plethora of meaning possibilities open up. Identification of the author refers to only
one form of naturalization in which the self-reflexive
- 37 -
qualities of literary narrative are recognized. Furthermore, naturalization operates most often out of awareness and is not a
consciously applied procedure. It operates powerfully both within the private interpretive world of patient and analyst and within
the world of normative case reporting. It does not need to be invoked; it operates anyway. It seeks to stabilize meaning by
drawing a boundary around sets of acceptable interpretations determined by the intertextuality of the day. These other texts
include both the normative and privileged competencies that Spence has distinguished. The texts cannot be confused, only more
or less orphaned from each other.
To the degree that the psychoanalytic text can maintain its orphanage and resist premature closure, it can rely here to the
same degree on the autonomous functioning of language and the free play of its signifiers to open up meaning. Language adds its
own reality to reported memories and experiences. The memories thereby become problematically uncertain; the experiences
become defamiliarized. The normative context becomes challengeable when language spoken in the psychoanalytic situation
opens up into orphaned text. We absolutely do not want to remember the experience as the patient does. We do not demand that
language be representative. We work so that it should free us through its unanchored signifiers even if as Spence argues, free
association does not necessarily lead us back to the historical event. We rejoice that the psychoanalytic situation cripples the
communicative circuitry of normalizing speech.
10. Summary
Understanding the therapeutic action of narrative in the psychoanalytic situation has been the primary focus of this article.
Freud began his understanding of the power of words by constructing a neurological apparatus that could account for
psychological phenomena such as memory, consciousness, and
- 38 -
repression. Like instinctual drive, the word and its presentation represented a borderline concept between mind and body.
Topographic and economic explanations accompanied Freud's understanding of the function of the word-presentation in the
psychic apparatus. Metaphors such as transcription and retranscription, breaching, failure in translation, and finally inscription on
the mystic writing-pad indicated that when describing the psychic apparatus, Freud specifically employed a writing metaphor that
elaborated words operating far from their connection to sound and speech. But when describing the therapeutic action of
psychoanalysis, Freud invoked the connection of word-presentation to sound. Speech enabled a hoodwinking of the
preconscious censor and an admission into consciousness of unconscious fantasy derivatives. Together, the writing and speech
metaphors allowed Freud to transcend the psychological positivism of his scientific contemporaries and to confront phenomena
that could not otherwise be readily plotted on Newtonian axes. Thus Freud could face with some equanimity the paradoxes of the
timeless unconscious and the shadowy outlines of reconstructed events in the life history of his patients.
Recent interest in the theory of psychoanalytic narrative has allowed a hermeneutic reexamination of the psychoanalytic
situation, finally freeing that examination from the metapsychological constraints of a biological model. To understand the
therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, it is no longer sufficient to refract it through a lens focused by models of the individual
psyche. By conceptualizing the psychoanalytic situation as a narrative jointly authored by analyst and analysand, structuralist and
poststructuralist poetics can then enlighten the universal phenomena and experiences of such an authorship. The joint authorship
of the psychoanalytic narrative is seen suspended in a sea of multitudinous other cultural texts. This intertextual potential
generates what is experienced as a push toward interpretation and renarration. The difference between any one psychoanalytic
narrative and any other potential or
- 39 -
actual narrative is the difference that makes a difference in the psychoanalytic encounter. Freud's writing metaphor need not
remain solely inscribed in neurological tissue, but can be reassimilated to the clinical psychoanalytic situation.
What distinguishes the psychoanalytic narrative from other narrative texts aside from joint authorship is that it is spoken in a
particular way and, aside from notes and case reports, is never written. The formal qualities of the psychoanalytic performance,
for example the absence of face-to-face communication, the injunction toward free association, the relatively anonymous analyst,
and the unevenness of the relationship between analyst and analysand, all conspire to remove the authors from the normal
constraints of communicational rules whose socially conservative functions have been well outlined by ethologists. A narrative
written according to these alternative rules approximates the free play of the signifier at work in any written text that is freed from
authorial intention. The monumentality and strangeness of the resulting text stands alone and demands interpretation in terms of
other cultural texts already familiar to both authors. Such demand for naturalization through interpretation simultaneously
operates on multiple levels of form and content that include syntax, plot, and, of course, story.
Any clinical parameter added to the psychoanalytic situation that prevents the engendered narrative from approximating the
ideal strangeness of the written text will reduce the generation of additional interpretation. The monumental-like strangeness of
the written text with its uncertain anchorage to the familiar can indeed be overwhelming to both authors. Under such
circumstances, it is not surprising that authorial intention is sometimes demanded by the analysand. The analysand often believes
that the analyst is the real author of the analysis. After all, the analyst must know what is coming next. The countertransference
difficulties that the analyst has prematurely returning the strange text to a communicational discourse are legion.
- 40 -
The push toward interpretation performs a social function that is essentially conservative. It is the push to make what is at
first strange and unexplainable familiar and known. To speak the unconscious tactfully is an act of recognizable narrative
competence. Continuing to disguise joint authorship in the psychoanalytic situation with biological models simply adds to the
mystification of therapeutic action and artifically separates it from the intertextual waters from which it draws its imaginative
power.
References
Barthes, Roland (1967), Systme de la Mode. Paris: Seuil.
Barthes, Roland (1971), Style and its image. In: Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. S. Chatman. New York: Oxford.
Barthes, Roland (1977), Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bateson, Gregory (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.
Bertalanffy, L. von (1968), General Systems Theory. New York: George Braziller.
Birdwhistell, R. L. (1970), Kinesics and Context. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Brenner, Charles (1976), Psychoanalytic Technique and Psychic Conflict. New York: International Universities Press.
Culler, Jonathan (1975), Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Culler, Jonathan (1981), The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1967), La Voix et le Phenomene. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Derrida, Jacques (1972), Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit.
Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Freud, Sigmund (1895), Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition, 1: 283-397. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.[]
Freud, Sigmund (1896), Letter 52. Standard Edition, 1: 233. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.[]
Freud, Sigmund (1900), The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition, 4 & 5: 1-721. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.[]
Freud, Sigmund (1915a), Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. Standard Edition, 14: 109-140. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.[]
Freud, Sigmund (1915b), The Unconscious. Standard Edition, 14: 161-215. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.[]
Freud, Sigmund (1918 [1914]), From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. Standard Edition, 17: 3-122. London: Hogarth Press,
1955.[]
Freud, Sigmund (1925 [1924]), A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad. Standard Edition, 19: 226-232. London: Hogarth Press,
1955.[]
Holt, R. (1976), Drive or wish? In: Psychology vs Metapsychology, eds. M.M. Gill & P.S. Holzman. Psychological Issues
Monogr 36. pp. 158-197. New York: International Universities Press.
- 41 -
Jakobson, Roman, & Halle, Morris (1956), Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Janua Linguarum, Mouton.
Jakobson, Roman, & Halle, Morris (1962), Selected Writings (4 vols.). The Hague: Mouton.
Klein, G. (1976), Two theories or one? In: Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials, Chap. 2, 47-71. New York:
International Universities Press.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1964), Le Cru et le Cuit. Paris: Plon.
Loewald, Hans W. (1980), Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Mahony, Patrick (1982), Freud as a Writer. New York: International Universities Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1889), Gtzendmmerung, oder wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-58), Collected Papers (8 vols.). ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Propp, Vladimir (1970), Morphology of the Folktale. Bloomington: Indiana Research Center in Anthropology.
Ricoeur, Paul (1977), The question of proof in Freud's psychoanalytic writings. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 25: 835-871.[]
Rosenblatt, A. D., & Thickstun, J. T. (1977), Modern Psychoanalytic Concepts in a General Psychology. Psychological Issues,
Monogr. 42/3 New York: International Universities Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1966), Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schafer, Roy (1979), Character, ego-syntonicity, and character change. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 27: 867-891.[]
Schafer, Roy (1980), Narration in the psychoanalytic dialogue. In: Critical Inquiry: On Narrative, Vol. 7 (1). Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Scheflen, A. E. (1973), Communicational Structure. Analysis of a Psychotherapy Transaction. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Shannon, Claude E., & Weaver, Warren (1949), The Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Board of Trustees of the
University of Illinois.
Spence, Donald P. (1982), Narrative Truth and Historical Truth. New York: W. W. Norton.[]
Torodov, Tzvetan (1970), Introduction la littrature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.
Torodov, Tzvetan (1981), Introduction to Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Waelder, Robert (1976), The principle of multiple function. In: Psychoanalysis: Observation, Theory, Application, ed. S. A.
Guttman. New York: International Universities Press, pp. 68-83.
- 42 -
Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Bellin, E. H. (1984). The Psychoanalytic Narrative: On the Transformational Axis Between Writing and Speech. Psychoanalysis
and Contemporary Thought 7: 3-42

Bellin, E. H. (1984) - The Psychoanalytic Narrative On The Transformational Axis Between Writing and Speech

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Bellin, E. H. (1984) - The Psychoanalytic Narrative On The Transformational Axis Between Writing and Speech

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

(1984).

Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 7: 3-42

The Psychoanalytic Narrative

On the Transformational Axis Between Writing and Speech

Evan H. Bellin, M.D.

1. Challenge to Common Sense Determinism

2. Freud's Linguistic Theories of Writing and Speech

3. Narratology and the Psychoanalytic Situation

4. Poetics and Reader-Response Criticism

5. The Phonological Revolution of Modern Linguistics

6. Intertextuality and the Activation of Interpretive Operations

7. The Psychoanalytic Situation: on the Transformational Axis Between Writing and

8. The Linear Seductions of Narrative

that an analysis terminates when the patient realizes it could go on forever.

Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Potrebbero piacerti anche