Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue

Abstract

Freud established a tradition within which psychoanalysis is understood as an essentialist and positivist natural science. One need not be bound by this scientific commitment, however; the individual and general accounts and interpretations Freud gave of his case material can be read in another way. In this reading, psychoanalysis is an interpretive discipline whose practitioners aim to develop a particular kind of systematic account of human action. We can say, then, either that Freud was developing a set of principles for participating in, understanding, and explaining the dialogue between psychoanalyst and analysand or that he was establishing a set of codes to generate psychoanalytic meaning, recognizing this meaning in each instance to be only one of a number of kinds of meaning that might be generated. Psychoanalytic theorists of different persuasions have employed different interpretive principles or codes-one might say different narrative structures-to develop their ways of doing analysis and telling about it.' These narrative structures present or imply two coordinated accounts: one. of the beginning, the course, and the ending of human