The psychoanalytic life history: Narratives of desire and the desire to narrate

This study explores the epistemological status of the "clinical life history" in the psychotherapeutic field. Textual analyses of previous writings on the patient's life history suggest that the clinical anamnesis is a discursive category, which in different discursive contexts is endowed with diverse and incommensurable meanings and significations. Scrutiny of Adolf Meyer's approach to the patient's anamnesis demonstrated the prevailing commitment of psychotherapy to positivism and historical realism. The author challenges the narrative approach to psychoanalysis presented by Habermas, Ricoeur, Schafer, Spence and Geha. Endorsing the need to conceptualize the life history from relativistic perspectives, this study criticizes the view that the psychoanalytic endeavor aims to produce coherent, continuous and aesthetic life historical narratives. A close analysis of Freudian texts suggests that Freud construed the patient's life history not as a coherent narrative but as an endlessly unfolding story, saturated with ambiguities and multiple meanings. Examination of the assumptions of narrativity revealed narrative as an illusory binding metaphor which by selecting events and causes and rejecting unassimilable others imposes posteriorly and from the "outside" a desired sense of temporal continuity and intentionality which is absent from actual human experience. The author demonstrates that the idea of developing continuous and aesthetic life historical narratives is embedded in the tradition of American ego psychology, which views the ego as the synthetic and adaptive aspects of the personality that ought to be strengthened during the analytic treatment. Exploration of the Lacanian perspective on the life history supports the notion of the coherent life historical narrative as an ego artifact and suggests that the analyst does not pursue coherence and continuity but the subject's unconscious desires revealed at the points where the narrative stumbles and fails. The study suggests that the psychoanalytic life history is situated on the margins between the appearance and the disappearance of narrativity. The psychoanalytic life history, it is concluded, shares commonalities with assaults on narrative coherence in post-modern works of such authors as Borges and Calvino.