Paul Ricœur, Four Psychoanalytic Criteria. IV. Narrativity (2)
We have been discussing the importance for Ricoeur of “narration” in psychoanalysis. This is the fourth mark or “criterion” by which we recognize an experience, process, situation, object, and so on, as properly analytic. As we have seen, in order to “count” as analytic — to enter into analysis at all — the patient’s desire must
be (or become) expressible in words
assume an other-directed, dialogical form
announce an efficacious “psychic reality” which shapes the patient’s thought and behavior, and
We found, moreover, that for Ricoeur this power of narration is implicit in Freudian notions of memory and has therefore always borne the greatest importance in psychoanalysis. But we have not yet understood what, exactly, “narration” means for Ricoeur. Or, as we asked in the last entry: what does the concept of narration contribute to discussions of these matters, that has not been adequately captured by traditional, Freudian notions of “memory”? This is how Ricoeur puts things:
“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)
Hence our next questions arise immediately: what is involved in “forming meaningful sequences, orderly connections”? — what is it to “give one’s experience the form of a history”? — to unveil, or construct, the kind of “narrative structure” we associate with case histories?
To help with these questions, let us consider what Ricoeur says in other places about narration, particularly in two essays touching on similar matters: “Narrative: Its Place in Psychoanalysis” and (to a lesser degree), “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” The latter is mainly significant for containing an illuminating passage in which psychoanalysis is tied to narrativity in a summary way:
“The patient who addresses him- or herself to a psychoanalyst presents him with bits and pieces of lived histories, dreams, “primitive scenes,” conflicting episodes. We can rightly say that the goal and outcome of analytic sessions is that the person analyzed draws from these bits and pieces a narrative that is both more bearable and more intelligible. This narrative interpretation of psychoanalytic theory implies that the story of a life proceeds from untold and repressed stories in the direction of stories that the subject can be responsible for and take as constitutive of his or her personal identity. It is the search for this personal identity that guarantees the continuity between the potential or virtual story and the express story for which we assume responsibility.” (197-198)
This way of putting things gets to the heart of the matter. For what does it mean to call a narrative “fragmented” and why — to ask a naive question — should this fragmentation pose a problem for the patient? What, after all (and apart from its pejorative colorations), is wrong with fragmentation?
I will suggest that the descriptors “bearable” and “intelligible” in the quoted passage provide us with useful orientation here. To repeat: Ricoeur indicates that, at the beginning of a treatment, and for some time afterwards, the patient presents — and is hostage to — an insufficient, perhaps even a failed “narrative.” Initially, the latter — compounded from “bits and pieces of lived histories” — is neither “intelligible” to, nor “bearable” for, that patient. These two qualities of deficient narratives are perhaps inseparable; and the direction of inference may well run both ways. Perhaps, that is, a narrative is
unbearable insofar as it is unintelligible, since what can’t be grasped or known is ipso facto distressing, and
unintelligible insofar as it is unbearable, since what is overwhelming is forced out of awareness, repressed, experientially unapproachable — and hence unknowable
(In what follows I will focus on 1., though ultimately we ought not to let 2. entirely out of consideration.)
What, then, accounts for such a narrative? For Ricoeur, again, a narrative with these two qualities — unbearable and unintelligible — is essentially fragmentary. Fragmentation is, so to speak, the common denominator. The “bits and pieces” presented, the substance of the patient’s productions in an analysis, evidently amounts to a narrative with both gaps and inconsistencies.
Both gaps (omissions) and inconsistencies (conflicts) typify the beginning of an analysis, and perhaps — no matter the success — its entirety. On the one hand, there are holes in memory, all variety of blind spots and motivated inattentions, abrupt halts in the associative flows. One’s efforts toward self-narration is naturally hampered when important “pieces” are missing, connecting links inaccessible.
On the other hand, there may be no obvious “coherence” between any particular “fragment” and any other. Within a dream, for instance, it may be far from clear how the separate ingredients — settings, objects, affects, sensations, interactions, scenes, etc. — “add up”; they may even seem to exclude one another. (In a dream, such incongruities are evidently much more the rule than the exception. An objectively “pleasant” scene may generate anxiety; one that is objectively “dangerous” one may generate pleasure.) Likewise, the patient may struggle to harmonize the content of a dream (one, say, expressing hostility towards the analyst), with his everyday, conscious, and professed attitude (respectful, affectionate, and the like).
On the basis of these admittedly schematic reflections, we can now return to our questions: what makes a narrative fragmentary? — and why should this pose a problem for the patient? We can tentatively answer, first: a patient’s narrative is fragmentary inasmuch as it is characterized by (a) omissions and (b) inconsistencies. (The concept of “discontinuity,” too, seems to capture both qualities at a stroke.) But second: this fragmentation, as we saw above, poses a problem inasmuch as the patient experiences the narrative thus constructed as “unintelligible” and “unbearable” — each of which seems somehow to reinforce the other.
But why exactly, to complete the thought, should omissions and inconsistencies be “unintelligible” and “unbearable” to the patient whose narrative is afflicted by them? The first connection is simple enough to draw: omissions and inconsistencies are per definition the very stuff of “unintelligibility.” Our reason demands, if nothing else, that things “add up,” and seeks more, rather than less, “data.” Conversely, the least intelligible scenarios — obscure, mysterious, and disorienting — are those where (a) we know little or nothing, and (b) what we do know — or at least imagine we know — doesn’t cohere, or strikes us as self-contradictory.
In these respects, then, a fragmentary narrative is in principle an unintelligible one. But why, finally, should the patient find a fragmentary narrative — omission- and inconsistency-riddled — unbearable? I suggested above that what cannot be understood is ipso facto distressing — a proposition with a certain intuitive weight. This is the sort of epistemic uneasiness signaled in the opening sentence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
“Human reason has the peculiar fate…that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”
Rational creatures have an inborn conatus or drive to make sense of things and naturally feel happy when that drive is satisfied, unhappy when it is thwarted. Harry Stack Sullivan may have had this partly in mind when he suggested: “No one has grave difficulties in living if he has a very good grasp of what is happening to him.”
Yet Ricoeur seems to imply more than this in calling a fragmentary narrative “unbearable,” or at least difficult to bear. Or rather, he deepens the dilemma, the existential ramifications of finding oneself hostage to a fragmentary narrative. For the fragmentation in question extends, not only to this or that aspect of one’s mental life or situation, but into the core of one’s “self” tout court. We may state this interpretation as a syllogism:
If what I essentially “am” is inseparable from how I take myself to be — that is, my “self-concept” and, ultimately, my “self-narration”; and
this self-narration is “fragmented,” that is, involves profound omissions and inconsistencies; then
I am fragmented, do not “make sense” or “add up.” At worst, my own memories, affects, ideas, motivations, and conduct do not strike me as “mine” at all, but — such is the degree of self-alienation — manifestations of something decidedly “not me,” thing-like, and so on.
Indeed — and this is the point I’d really like to underscore in these reflections — since for Ricoeur narration is at bottom a modification (alongside language, intersubjectivity, and fantasy) of desire, it would make perfect sense to say: a fragmented narrative is one according to which desire itself is “out of sorts,” at odds with itself. And if this is correct, which seems likely enough, then it requires no argumentative leap to call a fragmented narrative “unbearable.” For in this case, desire itself, together with the mental and behavioral phenomena that evince it, is obscure and conflict-ridden. And what could be more unbearable than that?
The promise of narration in analysis, then — already embedded, purportedly, in Freudian notions of memory — consists in its power to remedy this fragmentation, that is, to restore the self to an “intelligible” and “bearable” condition. How is this achieved? And what is the theoretical significance of this procedure for our understanding of past, present, future, and their interrelations?
Somewhat unexpectedly, Ricoeur cites Nachträglichkeit (“afterward-ness”), a process by which the mind confers retroactive significance and efficacy to an earlier episode, as exemplary of psychoanalytic narration in general. In its original form, beginning at least with Freud’s early account of hysteria, Nachträglichkeit related narrowly to trauma. In particular, Freud made the claim that a certain event — not “in itself” traumatic, that is, not pathology-inducing when it occurs — may become traumatic later, by virtue of fresh experiences that endow the original event with a new, and newly-distressing, significance.
Ricoeur broadens the scope of this mechanism, though, so that it includes, not only the belated generation of trauma, but also the characteristic action of analysis: the retroactively healing or liberating narration of one’s past. The implications are immense:
“This phenomenon [Nachträglichkeit] is implied in the very work of psychoanalysis as psychoanalysis. It was in the process of working through…that Freud discovers that the history of a subject did not conform to a linear determinism, which would place the present under the control of a past in a univocal way…It was only the arrival of new events and new situations that precipitates the subsequent reorganization of these past events.” (59-60)
If we are prepared, then, to loosen this mechanism’s tight association with trauma, so that it embraces the basic procedures of psychoanalysis generally, then new conceptions of human self-consciousness, temporality, and freedom are brought into view. In fact, precisely this cluster of ideas will enable us to make a transition to the next phase of our commentary — on Ricoeur’s “archaeo-teleological principle.”
I will begin here in the next entry.