Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. IV. Narrativity (1)
The fourth and final criterion that a “fact” must meet in order to qualify as analytic is “narrativity.” Here again, we may construe this category as a modification of the “object” presupposed, uncontroversially, by psychoanalytic practice: namely, desire. How, to revisit our question, must desire be constituted, what characteristics must it bear, in order to appear as an object of possible analytic experience — assuming, as Ricoeur does, that there is such a thing? To recapitulate Ricoeur’s account: the desire encountered in analysis must
admit of say-ability or discursivity, in which form it becomes intelligible, meaningful, hence subject to interpretation;
contain at root an other-directed character, a “demand for recognition” addressed second-personally to a “you”; and
possess a psychic reality that — in the special attributes of unconscious life — stands comparison with “material reality”
We may now add that, for Ricoeur, this desire will also
submit to — be “absorbable” by — narration, in the absence of which quality, again, it could not “show up” at all in analytic experience
We might continue our Kantian reading here and say that an object — desire — that failed to conform to these four categories could simply not be an object of experience “for analysis.” Or, as Kant’s famously puts things in the Critique of Pure Reason, such an object “would be nothing to me” (B131-32).
A Clarification
Now, one may quibble here that, while criteria 1-3 directly modify desire, the fourth criterion pertains to memories — episodes, events, fragments, and so on. And in fact, the word “desire,” frequent enough in Ricoeur’s descriptions of the first three criteria, does not explicitly appear in this section.
But implicitly, at least, there can be no doubt that nothing essentially changes in the account. On the one hand, at the opening of this entire discussion, Ricoeur expressly told us that “the object of this discipline” is “desire as a meaning capable of being deciphered, translated, interpreted” (54). So it would be exceedingly strange if this final criterion had abruptly to do with some other object — as though the discipline of psychoanalysis were suddenly preoccupied with something essentially different. We must rather suppose that, however “shaped,” the materials that enter into analytic narration — episodes, events, fragments — are themselves configurations of desire.
On the other hand, Ricoeur’s preceding treatment of psychic reality has prepared us for just such an extrapolation. In bracketing “material reality” as clinically irrelevant, and in demanding of an analytic fact some “reference to the make-believe” (58), Ricoeur has perforce excluded from analytic experience any data “untouched” by desire. Psychic reality certainly embraces “fantasy” in the narrow sense — something inseparable from memories of sexualized childhood experiences and thus, inevitably, desire. But even mental phenomena that appear very remote from this “kernel” are inflected by desire in just the same way:
“But the notion of psychic reality is not exhausted by that of a fantasy in the sense of these archaic scenarios. The imaginary, in the broad sense, covers every kind of mediation implied in the development of desire.” (57)
Hence we may confidently conclude that the narration-conferring capacity of analysis, confined as it is to psychic-reality, is also — by definition — confined to mental productions generated, organized, and delimited by desire.
The Meanings of Narration
With these clarifications in place, we may return to Ricoer’s comments on this fourth criterion and ask: what exactly is narration in an analytic context? — how and why does an analysis go about its narrations? — with what “materials?” Ricoeur himself says the following:
“The analytic experience selects from a subject’s experience what is capable of entering into a history, in the sense of a narrative. In this sense, the “case histories” as histories constitute the primary texts for psychoanalysis.” (58)
We may straightaway note an ambiguity. These case histories document, reconstruct, organize the “histories” both of
the patient’s life, in the wide sense — the biography inasmuch as it has been experienced by the patient and has borne on his psychological development and current difficulties, and of
the treatment, in the narrow sense, embracing the analytic situation, interchanges, relationship, and everything “analytic” that materializes within its spatio-temporal limits.
At a certain point, of course, the “narrow” case history (the content of the treatment) enters into the “broad” case history (that is, becomes a formative event in the patient’s psycho-biography) — provided, that is, the treatment succeeds.
Nonetheless, without distinguishing, especially, between these two notions, let us ask: in what sense are case histories “narratives” or “histories”? For Ricoeur, the “‘narrative’ character of analytic experience” (58-59) is, if never thematized by Freud, nonetheless implied in the latter’s views regarding memory. And if, as we have seen, the “memories” to be restored are, not veridical recordings of “material reality” but, paradigmatically, desire-encoded “fantasies” of early life, this does not diminish in the slightest their “psychic reality,” and thus the necessity of their recollection as fantasies. And this recollection will, Ricoeur now emphasizes, take a particular form:
“But what is it to remember? It is not just the power to recall certain isolated events, but to become capable of forming meaningful sequences, orderly connections. In short, it is the power to give one’s experience the form of a history for which an isolated memory is just one fragment. It is the narrative structure of these ‘life histories’ that makes a ‘case’ into a ‘case history.’” (59)
That Freudian analysis is preoccupied essentially with “remembering,” via whatever paths, is hardly a claim that requires justification. From the early account of Dora to the late “Constructions” essay, Freud unwaveringly insists that a successful analysis releases repressions and repairs memory — that, indeed, these are merely two sides to one and the same action. An analysis arranges for this “remembering” by foreclosing where possible the sorts of behavior, the “repetition compulsions,” whereby repressed memories are unconsciously reenacted. (This technique represents a particular variant of the more general principle of non-gratification, which demands the verbal “expression" of desire rather than its “discharge” in action.)
Let us grant, then, that psychoanalysis induces a “work of memory” and that its materials are, at their core, the unconscious “memories” — however non-veridical — that haunt neurotics. (Ricoeur approvingly quotes the canonical line from Breuer and Freud: “Hysterics suffer principally from reminiscences.”) But again: what does it mean — and what does it contribute — to re-describe the function of memory in analysis in terms of narration? In other words: why does Ricoeur designate this fourth criterion “narrative,” rather than limiting himself to the more familiar, less conspicuous “memory?”
The answer seems to be that the concept of “narrative” effectively isolates either the specific type of remembering encouraged in analysis (as contrasted with other, non-analytic types), or an aspect of all remembering that, nonetheless, analysis brings out particularly well, and deliberately. (Whether it is the one or the other may not matter to Ricoeur’s account.) In either case, we evidently cannot grasp the achievement of analytic remembering without reference to the virtues of narration. What are the virtues of narration, then, which for Ricoeur distinguish the process of analytic memory?
I will continue this account of Ricoeur’s fourth criterion in the next entry.