Case Histories and Fiction

Pirandello sat in his writing room into which characters came to him to share their narratives

King Henry wrote narratives for everyone he came in contact with

George Kelly

wrote characters for his patients.

action takes place in the dialogue between therapist and patient…. subjectivism, 

Socratic Dialogue

Object Relations

Winnicott and the Squiggle Game 

Online Games

Analytic Attitude

Object Relations as a dialogue between entities … entities joining up to form an identity

Endgame : the externalized dramatization of psychic object relations

Gibson?:Cyberspace is the space which you enter on the telephone. Now social apps.

Narrative TruthNarrative vs Truth

Vahinger

Spence

In the Poetics , Aristotle claims that plot is the most important feature of a narrative. A good story has a beginning, middle, and end, making a shapely whole with no extraneous elements. Aristotle also addressed the social and psychological role of narration. He described tragic drama as the purging or catharsis of the undesirable emotions of pity and fear by first arousing them and then clearing them away.

Bakhtinian, or dialogical theories (Mikhail Bakhtin); 

psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Schafer, Spence, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham);

Some general features of this literature include the idea that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives, a position most extremely stated by the Structuralists, and that there is a complex interaction between the telling of stories and what is told in them, especially their performative dimension.

According to J. Hillis Miller, we need narratives in order to give sense to our world, and the shape of that sense is a fundamental carrier of the sense. We need the “same” stories over and over, as a powerful way to assert the basic ideology of our culture. Miller also suggests that in some way these stories do not satisfy. In this respect, he comes close to Paul de Man’s description of texts. According to de Man, “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadibility of the prior narration.” (Allegories of Reading, p.205)

The extensions of narrative inquiry as ways of describing both history writing and psychoanalysis have called into question the precise nature of their respective claims to truth .

While Freud never explicity discussed the narrative character of the analytic experience, later writers such as Sherwood and Spence have pointed to its central importance and have shown the ways in which the psychoanalytic dialogue seeks to uncover the analysand’s efforts to maintain a certain kind of narrative discontinuity. To remember, then is precisely not to recall events as isolated; it is to become capable of forming meaningful narrative sequences. (Connerton)

In Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, Donald Spence suggests that psychoanalytic narratives should be thought of more as construction than as reconstruction, that psychoanalysts give up the archaological model and think of interpretation as a pragmatic statement with no necessary referent in the past — in short that narrative truth replace historical truth. The test of this truth is a therapeutic one, and Spence notes that Freud came to take the position that “an assured conviction of the truth of the construction … achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory . Spence compares this construction to an artistic and rhetorical product.

This pragmatic approach to the truth has exposed a vulnerability in the Freudian structure that critics have been quick to exploit, especially in relation to Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory.  The extravagant claims of recovered memories of child abuse and of consequent multiple personality disorder are but the counterpart of this attack on Freud.

George Kelly scripted characters for his patients to portray… Construct altenativeism

Solomon : emotions as occurring in the space between people

Schafer and the Intersubjectivists

Objects in therapy and programs

Goes from a Case History through to a failed  double nihilistic psychotherapeutic process

The other chapters are generated by the development of the therapeutic process as articled from the metaphor of a study of Elaboration

The failure of termination as “only thing you should get from the patient is money”

Case History Laura written as a join project of patient and therapist — by the third mind

use of the double nihilism

a fictionalized elaboration of several different therapies.

Laurie Anderson

as the instantiation of the inter subject creative force governing the therapeutic process

Patient forging and strengthening identity, therapist summing it up

We begin to realize that you can’t get to her through her “Dream Book” because she does not unmask her personal dynamics. This is something that this case history hopes to work through. 

Like Laurie Laura hides behind her creativity

Written by both therapist and patient

Identity Issues

Social Anxiety

Alienated from parents (by death?)

The book the therpy’s baby

the media that contains her creation

but failure at termination (Katy)

Becomes successful and leaves abruptly on her own. Brendan  training wheels 

Failed termination  — 

Laura mid 20s

Turtle vest