Anderson-Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of the Narrative Self and Narrative-Based Therapy

7/31/2019 Anderson-Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of the Narrative Self and Narrative-Based Therapy

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Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of Narrative

Self-constitution and Narrative-based Therapy

(7/7/11 Draft)

Travis Anderson,Brigham Young University ([email protected])

I. Introduction

This paper is thoroughly propaedeutic in nature. It is meant to briefly and tentatively

review, relate and explore some of the more compelling implications of philosophical and

psychological texts which have suggested or entailed a claim that the self (not the mind, soul, or

metaphysical subject, but the I to which each of us refers in thinking or saying myself) is best

understood as an embodied, self-conscious, and prolonged activity of dramatic self-narration. The

first major premise of this study is that Descartes, Hume, and especially Nietzsche and Heidegger,

were right in implying, and at various times explicitly claiming, that the self is a function of

creative existential processes having a narrative (though not always verbal) structure. The second

is that while Freud committed himself to various questionable topological models of the psyche,

both his clinical observations and the successes of his various investigative methods similarly

attest to (and are best explained by) a narrative conception of the self. This paper will further

consider whether non-narrative influences and determinants of the self (both genetically-controlled

components like gender, race, and bodily features, as well as existentially-fixed components like

native language, native country and culture, and historical situationelements which situate and

initiate the trajectory of self-narration even though they arent controlled by or reducible to it) are

architectonically structured and assigned meaning by the narrative activity that weaves them

together into a cohesive wholethus functioning as threads of an animated tapestry the evolving


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pictorial configuration of which is what ultimately determines their significance and role. Lastly,

this paper will argue that the time at play in the narrative structure of the self must be an

interpersonal time like that articulated by the French phenomenlogist Emmanuel Levinas, a time

which grounds the possibility of a personal history capable of therapeutic revision. Given these

premises, this paper will suggest that many forms of psychotherapybad or goodcould be

profitably understood as interpersonal interventions which effectively contribute to or manipulate

any and all of the pre-narrative, narrative and meta-narrative elements of the self that are

continually legislating and structuring the lived activities of self-constitution, self-identity and self-

affirmation. It may also follow that while scientific methods and reasoning can and should be used

to the collect data and address physiological factors contributing to psychological issues, many

forms of psychotherapy are fundamentally variations of textual hermeneutics, Hence, those forms

of psychotherapy would be social sciences only to the degree that their hermeneutic interventions

are guided and informed by theoretically sound methods and accurate data.

II. The Birth and Annihilation of the Modernist Self

On November 10, 1619, Rene Descartes initiated his famous metaphysical ruminations that

were to result in the affirmation of an indubitable cogito, which Descartes was later to describe in

his Discourse on the Method as a substance entirely distinct from the body, whose whole

essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any thing,

in order to exist (1985, p. 127). In the Meditations, Descartes amplified this explanation of his

thinking substance: What then am I? he asked himself. His answer: A thing that thinks. What

is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines

and has sensory perceptions (1984, p. 19). In all of these descriptionswhich identify not only


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activities constitutive of the cogito, but indicate a curious separation of the cogito from its

empirically-affirmed environmentDescartes betrays his conceptual debt to Montaigne, who in

searching for a universal human nature similarly discovered only his own thoughts, feelings, and

emotions, separated from the world and from the ideas and affectations of other selves (Gaukroger,

1995, pp. 318-19).

And yet, in a skeptical reversal the significance of which cannot be overstated (but is often

overlooked), Descartes pushed his analysis in theMeditations beyond the indubitability of a cogito

and the identification of its constitutive activities, to a genuine aporia. Firstly, after remarking that

his list of attributions to the I is a considerable one, he asked himself if every activity on the list

indeed belongs to him:

Is it not one and the same I who is now doubting almost everything, who nonetheless

understands some things, who affirms that this one thing is true, denies everything else,

desires to know more, is unwilling to be deceived, imagines many things even

involuntarily, and is aware of many things which apparently come from the senses? Are not

all these things just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I am asleep all the time, and even

if he who created me is doing all he can to deceive me? Which of all these activities is

distinct from my thinking? Which of them can be said to be separate from myself? (1985,

p. 19)

Descartes responded to these questions by affirming (twice) that the I who is doubting,

understanding, willing and imagining is indeed the same I whose existence is beyond doubt,

even if the objects of that understanding, imagining or perceiving are in many ways doubtful. Said

otherwise, while Descartes concluded that the objective correlates of ideas and affectations can be

legitimately doubted, those mental activities themselves cannot. Hence, the existence of the I is


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indubitable precisely because it is nothing other than the sum of those activities which both

constitute and affirm it even in the very act of doubting it. Secondly, in a this singular observation

which merits particular attention, Descartes confesses that he is haunted by this troubling

discovery:

It still appearsand I cannot stop thinking thisthat the corporeal things of which images

are formed in my thought, and which the senses investigate, are known with much more

distinctness than this puzzling I which cannot be pictured in the imagination. And yet it

is surely surprising that I should have a more distinct grasp of things which I realize are

doubtful, unknown and foreign to me, than I have of that which is true and knownmy

own self. (1985, p. 20)

Descartes observation highlights the curious fact that the indubitable I cannot perceive or

picture itself despite its own self-certainty. While empirical objects can be made present to

thought, and conceived distinctly (thoroughly submitted to analysis), however doubtful they may

be, the nature or strange substantiality of the I itselfcannot be thought at all apart from its own

activity. Descartes tried to resolve this puzzle by distinguishing perception and imagination from

intellect and judgment, and by attributing knowledge only to thoughts originating in the latter two

sources. And even though such a distinction provides a workable account (however problematic)

of why the truthfulness of imaginations and perceptions is less certain that that of judgments, it

does not explain why the I, apparently unlike all other substances, can truly manifest its

existence and activity without simultaneously revealing itself. Descartes never returns to solve this

aporia. And with good reason, as we will discover: the only plausible answer to his perplexing

question of how the I can indeed exist without providing any way to perceive or picture that

existence would undermine Descartes entire metaphysical system, which rests securely on the


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presumption of two fundamental substances, of which body is oneand mind the other.

Descartes aporia was deepened and almost solved by David Humes famous examination

of the self inA Treatise of Human Naturepublished in 1739, one hundred and twenty years after

Descartes carried out his metaphysical ruminations. Hume noted that the various conceptions of

the soul or mind authored by Western philosophy are predominantly those of an immaterial

subjectum that is both simple (irreducible to parts) and permanent (invariably the same). He further

observed that this subjectivity is presumed to be the enduring locus of all our constantly fluctuating

mental states, willful activities and individual psychological characteristics. Accordingly,

committed as he was to a belief that all objectively valid simple or complex ideas must be traceable

to simple sense impressions, Hume attempted to trace our idea of theselfto a simple and invariable

sense impressionbut without success. He therefore reasoned: Self or person is not any one

impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference. If

any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same,

thro the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no

impression constant and invariable (Treatise, p. 251, emphasis mine). Having thus failed to

discover any enduring impression to which an idea of the self as such could be linked and thereby

legitimated (and having refused from the outset to endorse without evidence Descartes dogmatic

belief in a soul with which the self could be metaphysically identified and thereby substantiated),

and yet, having affirmed Descartes assertion that the self is inseparable from the mental activities

associated with it, Hume is forced to the inescapable conclusion (virtually identical to that which

Husserl and other phenomenologists draw almost two hundred years later) that the self can only be

identical to consciousness itself, since it ceases to exist when conscious activities are suspended or

curtailed:


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When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular

perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never

can catch myselfat any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the

perception. When my perceptions are removd for any time, as by a sound sleep; so long

am I insensible ofmyself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions

removd by death, and coud I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the

dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated. (Treatise, p. 252)

Consequently, explained Hume, the self must be nothing other than a bundle of fluctuating

perceptions, while the mind is a kind of theatre on which those perceptions play out:

I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or

collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable

rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux or movement . . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where

several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and

mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly nosimplicity in it

at any one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensity we may have to

imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theater must not mislead us.

They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most

distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which

it is composed. (Treatise, pp. 252-53)

In sum, Hume concluded that the selfso long as it existscan be nothing other than a rapid and

ceaseless succession of conscious perceptions, played out as it were upon a stage. And since there

is no subjective identityper se to be found in any of those staged impressions, the selfper se is not

a substance, nor even a genuine idea; it is a fanciful fabrication of which we speak through sheer


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force of habit.

Ironically, given Humes own cautionary advice not to let the metaphor of a theater

mislead us, it is Hume himself who is ultimately mislednot by the metaphor, it is true, but by his

own overly cautious reading of it. Like Descartes before him, he does not attend carefully enough

to the implications of his own proto-phenomenological descriptions, and he dismisses them

without recognizing their obvious importance to his analytic account. What Humes analysis

nevertheless reveals, and what his metaphor underscores, is that the I or self is notreducible to

perceptions bundled without unity, as he erroneously supposes. Furthermore, the selfdoes indeed

emerge on the stage where those perceptions are collected, rehearsed, and granted or denied an

audience. While it is true that the self is not identifiable with any one (or the sum total) of the

almost infinite mental activities or perceptions themselves, a unified self nevertheless takes shape

on the stage of mental activity precisely through the unifyingactivity of collecting, rehearsing and

experiencing them. In other words, it is theplay, not the players, that constitutes the characteristic

simplicity and misunderstood invariability of the self; the phantom I or self that constantly slips

through the glove of philosophers sensitive only to substance is precisely the activity of conscious

life, an activity, moreover, that by virtue of its directionality, duration and logographic cohesion is

best conceived (I will argue) as having a narrative structure. To employ a more contemporary and

apt metaphor, Humes constantly fluctuating and staged bundle of perceptions is a moving

picture or movie in which perceptions are sequentially presented, plotted out, and edited

together into a dramatic narrative whole.

Hume (like Kant after him) was absolutely right to conclude, against Descartes, that we

have no defensible justification for believing the self is reducible to a substance or thing, even a

thinkingsubstance. But Hume was wrong to suppose in consequence of that insight that the selfs


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irreducibility to matter, soul, or some other substantial form or entity precludes it being a non-

substantial and temporally extended, but self-consciously connected series of lived activities,

affective states and conscious experiences (as Descartes glimpsed, though through a glass darkly,

and as I think Kant began to understand, as evidenced by his insistence on the unity of

apperception). Yet even Kant was wrong to ground that unity, in accordance with the

transcendental structures of reason, in a transcendental subjectper sehowever much he qualified

that claim by insisting that one should never try to intuit or represent the transcendental subject, or

even reference it except by way of an empty concept.

Nevertheless, it was Kant who illuminated the key to solving the ontological puzzle of the

self by highlighting and further developing Humes insight that any and all experiencesbe they

perceptions, imaginations, affectations, or ideasmust be claimed as mine in order to count as

experience at all. Martin Heidegger then supplemented Kants discovery with Edmund Husserls

revived scholastic doctrine of intentionality to demonstrate that subjectivity thought as an

underlying metaphysical substance is not only an insurmountably problematic construct, but an

unnecessary and illegitimate one. Despite its own shortcomings, Heideggers existential analytic of

Dasein (a conception of human being that refuses from the outset to relinquish its verbal emphasis

on the activity of being human) was thus able to affirm, without positing any noumenal or

transcendental subjectivity, the wholeness of what Kant tried to think thorough the unity of

apperception. Heidegger was also able deepen that unity by phenomenologically and

hermeneutically revealing it to be an existential and narrative whole.

According to Heidegger, Dasein can be disclosed as a unitary, logographic and self-

understood phenomenon by beginning with an interrogation of its everyday being in the world, and

then progressively articulating the existential and hermeneutical determinants and meanings of that


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being in their structural totality. Heideggers Daseinanalytik thus moves through four

phenomenological stages (depending on how they are read). First, Dasein is revealed to be an

apriori being-in-the-world and with-others, whose existential, factical, and fallen articulations

are superficially unified through the propriety or mine-ness (eigentlichkeit) of its variable but

continual projects, affects and experiences. Second, Dasein as my being-in-the-world and with-

others is more fundamentally understood to be care, an ongoing concernful disclosure of the

being of things, others, and ofDasein itself which is gathered into a extended personal narrative by

Daseins discourse, self-understanding, and basic disposition of anxiety about its own being. Third,

Dasein as care is demonstrated to be an ek-static (temporally extended and self-consciously

engaged), anticipatory being-toward-death that is called by its anxiety, care for things, and

solicitude for others to the existential wholeness of a resolute (guilty and responsible), authentic

life. And fourth, anticipatory resoluteness is fundamentally revealed to be a finite and historical

self-projection that both constitutes and belongs to a transcendent world in disclosing and making

that world its own on the basis of its unifying ecstatic temporality, thereby opening a time and

place for the meaning of being to be continually, but personally enactedon the stage, as it were,

of embodiedDa-sein or situated be-ing.

The fact that conscious experience is in each and every case mine, and that it is not only

articulated through its authentic and inauthentic projects and social engagements, but unified in a

conscientious and discursive self-understanding that is itself grounded in an ecstatic disclosure of

being played out as the lived experience ofDasein, all indicate that the self as such (what

Heidegger might call thefundamentalwho of Daseins being in the world) has the structure of a

dramatic narrative, as we will understand it. To see that narrative structure thematized in thinking

that is explicitly attuned to the psychological (rather than existential) question of the self, we turn


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now to Freud and Nietzsche.

III. Early Freudian Contributions to Understanding the Narrative Self

Some of the more seminal of Freuds insights into the narrative nature of the self are

perhaps best approached through a brief review of his early discoveries concerning dream analysis.

While lacking the voluminous case studies and resultant explanation of mind that are recorded in

his monumental 1899 tome The Interpretation of Dreams, Freuds later prcis, On Dreams, may be

the better text with which to begin, since it presents a concise explanation of latent and manifest

dream content, of the wish-fulfillment function performed by dreams, and of the various dream

work mechanisms that are relevant to Freuds revolutionary dream analysis methods. And it is

with these methods that we find yet another key with which to unlock the secrets of the self.

According to Freud, adult dreams express repressed wishes, either openly or disguisedly.

The work of dreaming entails the production of a condensed, displaced, and regressive code that

requires psychoanalytic interpretation to decompress, defragment, and verbalize. Freud explains

that dream condensation dramatizes and over-determines meaning, dream displacement breaks it

up, and dream regression undoes the logical links or narrative connections which hitherto held

the psychical material together (1952, p. 41). In short, what Freud calls dream work is a psychic

process in which latent dream meaning (which itself derives largely from past conscious

experience) is replaced by manifest content having formal characteristics in the dreams own

texture (Ibid.). For example, the work of dreaming may replace the logical connections common

to waking consciousness with an oneiric pictorial approximation of those connections, represented

temporally and spatially. Alternately, the dream work may replace a lived conflict of will with an

image or feeling of inhibited movement. The work of analysis, on the other hand (what Freud


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sometimes calls intellectual speech), undoes the dream work by restoring to the manifest dream

content the latent narrative forms characteristic of waking life.

This restoration is not to be understood by Freud as a mere recuperation of meanings that

are themselves established and subsequently concealed by dreaming, however; the dream text of

interest to Freud is not written by an unconscious author, but by the conscious analysand in the

process of recounting the dream. Responding to frequent contentions that dream interpretation can

never be rigorously scientificsince we seem to have no actual knowledge of the dream itself, but

only fragmentary and distorted recollections of itFreud freely concedes in The Interpretation of

Dreams that the recollected content of a typical dream is both mutilated and falsified by memory.

And Freud seems to agree with at least one author (Spitta) who points out that not only does the

reconstituting work of memory render our dreams hazy and disconnected, it also embellishes them

with added details. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, Freud seems to agree as well with the

claim that the work of memory adds to the recollected dream content an order and coherence

lacking in the dream itself (1965, p. 551). While all such observations would seem to argue against

both the possibility of ever retrieving for analysis the original content of a dream, as well as the

possibility of attaching any reliable meaning to a dreams recollected details, Freud paradoxically

insists that precisely the most trivial elements of a dream are indispensible to its interpretation

(1965, p. 552). In fact, he claims that we must attend to every shade of the form of words in

which they were laid before us (Ibid.). The reason for this, he explains, is that dream analysis

produces a text of sortsindeed, a holy writ (Ibid.). This text is not the product of an

arbitrary improvisation, as some of his contemporaries assumed or contended. Neither is it

always an accurate record of the dream itself. The crucial point in understanding Freudian dream

analysis lies in the recognition that what really matters is our reconstitutive recollection and


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narrative recountingof the dream, not the dream itselfthat, and the fact that there are right and

wrong ways to carry out any narrated recollection.

Recovery efforts that aim solely at reconstituting the original dream are destined to prove

largely unproductive, and perhaps even counter-productive, says Freud, since they will not only

distort the dream thereby, but misunderstand the resultant distortions. The frequent mutilation of a

dream that results from the dreamers own crude attempts to remember or recount it is to be

properly understood, not as the lamentable consequence of an inability to remember dreams

completely, but as the secondary (and often ill conceived) revision of the dream by the agency

which carries out normal thinking, . . . a part of the revision to which the dream-thoughts are

regularly subjected as a result of the dream censorship (1965, p. 552). Dream revision, in contrast

to dream analysis, is a psychical activity completely analogous to waking thought (analogous,

but not identical to) and it consists in a misguided attempt at interpretation which renders the

dream beautifully polished and surfaced (1952, pp. 48-49). Dream revision thus produces a

well-constructed but falsified dream recollection, the superimpositions of which have to be

subsequently demolished as part of the dream analysis.

Furthermore, Freud insists that the various distortions produced by unguided (or

misguided) interpretation, especially thesubtle redactions and glosses belonging to the narration as

such, are often much more revelatory than are obvious revisions of the dreamand sometimes

more illuminating than correctly remembered aspects of the dream. Hence, while other writers of

the period attended exclusively to the manifest dream content, or to overt aspects of a dreamers

revisionist distortions, Freud claims that psychoanalysis should attend to the less obvious though

much more far-reaching modifications and narrative gaps that have already developedthe dream

out of hidden dream thoughtsspecifically in the course of its being remembered and put into


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words. There is nothing arbitrary about this determinative distortion, insists Freud; the changes

and substitutions and gaps contributed by what he calls the editorship of waking life are

associatively linked to the material they replace, revise or redact (1965, p. 553). Freud explains that

in analyzing his patients dreams, he asks them to repeat their respective accounts. In doing so, he

observes, they rarely use the same words. This discovery opens upon the possibility of applying a

genuine method to dream analysis: Freud attends specifically to those parts of the dream account

that are either described differently or remembered differently the second time around, since those

differences reveal the weak spots in the dreams disguise, the material hastily covered over by

conscious thought in an attempt to hide its significance or otherwise alter what consciousness itself

recognizes as the dreams true meaning (it also reveals that consciousness must have some pre-

narrative access to those supposedly unconscious elements, or they could not be identified and

edited in their narration). A patients doubt about whether his or her dream has been correctly

reported derives from this work of dream-censorshipthat is, it indicates the patients resistance

to any penetration of proscribed dream thoughts into conscious waking life (hence Freuds first

rule of psychoanalysis, that whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance

(1965, p. 555).

Freuds explanations of dream analysis show that he is neither being disingenuous nor self-

contradictory in conceding, on the one hand, that dreams are inevitably distorted in their

subsequent recollection and recitation, while maintaining, on the other hand, that those distortions

do not of themselves prevent a rigorous revelatory analysis of the dreamerneither do they

prevent us from recovering the truth of the dream. And this is not because Freud believes that

those distortions can lead to a recovery of original dream content forgotten, hidden and mutilated

by the dreamers recollection and narration of the dream (though he does apparently believe such a


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recovery to be possible on occasion). It is because the recovery of original dream content is not the

aim of dream analysis. What must be noticed in Freuds explanations is that the dream itself is

relatively inconsequential. The dream is important primarily as the locus for a narrative encounter

asFreud points out: It is often possible by means of analysis to restore all that has been lost by

the forgetting of the dreams content; at least, in quite a number of cases one can reconstruct from

a single remaining fragment, not, it is true, the dreamwhich is in any case a matter of no

importancebut all the dream thoughts (1965, p. 556, emphasis mine). In other words (and

contrary to the assumptions guiding much current dream therapy), a dreamers narration of the

dream, not the dream itself, is the true object of analysis; the dreams true significance lies in the

occasion it provides for interpretation, for narrative intervention. As Paul Ricoeur notes, It is not

the dream as dreamed that can be interpreted, but rather the text of the dream account; analysis

attempts to substitute for this text another text that could be called the primitive speech of desire

(Freud and Philosophy, 1970, p. ?).

What Freud grasped about dreamsdreams understood as oneiric analogues of myths,

artworks, psychoses and prophetic utterancesis akin to what Nietzsche grasped about Greek

gods and heroes, understood as waking models and creative precursors of cultural and psychic

transformation: their narration both conceals and reveals the desires and the self-understanding of

the narrators themselves. In the case of divine or mythical figures, it is the individual and cultural

retellings of mythic lives and exploits that determinatively shapes the teller (just as the variable

subjects of any artistic rendering determinately shape the artist); in the case of dreams, what is of

seminal importance is the dreamers account of the dream. In both cases the narrative account

constitutes what can be considered a chapter of self-narration for the dreamer. It is the narration

of the dream or the myth that is important. It is the narration that reveals the gaps in the


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analysands memory and fills the gaps in his or her account. It is the narration that both produces

and reveals the redactions, edits, and other distortions of the dream affected by the analysand in

recounting the dream. In short, it is primarily not the dream per se that is significant, but the

meanings and desires attached (or denied) to the dream by the dreamer in recollecting and

explicitly narrating the dream or some mutilated version thereof. Hence, it is to the narration that

the therapist must primarily attend in any methodological work of dream analysis, not to efforts at

recovering the dream itself in some impossible and non-existent purity. This was Freuds first great

discovery, and despite his questionable attempts at hypostasizing a substantial or metaphysical

subject out of the activity of self-narration, it must be noted that hypnosis, free association, and the

many other therapeutic methods employed or developed by Freud all depend for their success on

narrative revision or intervention. And this led to Freuds second great discovery: the cure for

neurotic problems revealed through narrative-based analysis is narrative interventionthe so

called talking cure.

IV. Nietzsches Concept of Self-authorship

InEcce Homo Nietzsche boldly declares, That a psychologist without equal speaks from

my writings is perhaps the first insight reached by a good readera reader as I deserve him, who

reads me the way good old philologists read their Horace (1967, p. 266). What do such readers

find in reading Nietzsche? They do not find a disembodied collection of Nietzsches ideas; if

readers approach Nietzsches texts (especially the later texts) with such a discovery in mind, they

will no doubt make that discovery, but they will not have read Nietzsche. Reading Nietzsche

means reading along as Nietzsche writes his life. That is Nietzsches truth, pure and simple: we

write our own life, and who we are is to be found in that writingnot in the textit produces, but in


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the very actof writing. This is, in fact, the truth he declares with the aphorism that prefaces the text

ofEcce Homo (the subtitle of which is, How One Becomes What One Is): On this perfect day,

when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon

my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. . .

. How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? And so I tell my life to myself (1967, p. 221).

Following many scholars, it is easy to readEcce Homo as a backward-looking self-survey

of Nietzsches texts, a kind of comprehensive critical postscript. ButEcce Homo is auto-biography

in the true sense, a writing of Nietzsches life (or at least an exemplary moment of that project), for

inEcce Homo the exegetical light of Nietzsches praise and criticism is not so much directed at his

books, but at his life, at the stages of self-narration to which each of his books contributes and of

which they bear record. Freud is reputed to have said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating

knowledge of himself than any other man who has lived or was ever likely to live (Jones, p. 344;

Nietzsche, 1967, p. 203). If this is true, it is because Nietzsche used writing as a constant means of

examining his life in the very living of it; writing, for Nietzsche, was the analogue to what Freud

would consider narrating and deciphering the latent meaning in the manifest content of dreams;

just as Freudian analysis unravels the oneiric fabric of the dream work and reweaves it in

accordance with the coherent logic of waking, conscious life, so too does the Nietzschean act of

writing decipher the rebus of pre-ontological experience and reconstitute it into a coherent, self-

referential narrative of self-understanding. In the process, Nietzsche discovers quite early in his life

that the metaphysical notion of the subject is a spurious one, blindly endorsed on the basis of

ordinary language and in consequence of a false analogy drawn between grammatical predication

and ontological attribution (a mistake to which even Freud falls prey, especially in the 1895

Project).


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Nietzsches first refined expression of the connection between language and subjectivity

appears in his unfinished (and unpublished) 1873 essay On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral

Sense, bits and pieces of which he reuses throughout his later published works. But the clearest

articulation of it is in The Genealogy of Morals, published in 1887, and prefaced with the

tantalizing accusation that we are unknown to ourselves, insofar as present experience always finds

us absent-minded (1967, p. 15). His point, in part, is that we are always and vainly searching

after a ghostly metaphysical meaning to our lives rather than luxuriating in the plentiful sensibility

of the present. But the correlative, and more important point is that we hyperopically look for self-

identity in what Levinas will later call the second structural moment of hypostasis, the moment in

which activity or being ostensibly petrifies into substantiality or beings, rather than recognizing

meaning in the dynamic moment of action that necessarily precedes any reification of action into

an act, or any hypostatization of acting into a subject or substance. Lamenting ressentiments

refusal or repression of the constitutive desire to overcome, to express itselfas strength, as force,

and finding therein a mortification of being, not the agency of a neutral subjectwho can choose

without any diminution of being whether or not to express that being, Nietzsche argues that ones

identity and nature is not to be located at the level of an ontological subject, to which actions can

be independently predicated like verbs to a noun:

A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this

driving, willing, and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors

of reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional

upon an agency, a subject, can make it appear otherwise. And just as the common people

separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to be a deed, something performed by

a subject, which is called lightning, popular morality separates strength from the


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manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong

person which had thefreedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum;

there is no being behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; the doer is invented

as an afterthought,the doing is everything. . . . The scientists do no better when they

say force moves, force causes and such like,all our science, in spite of its coolness and

freedom from emotion, still stands exposed to the seduction of language and has not rid

itself of the changelings foisted upon it, the subjects (the atom, is for example, just such a

changeling, likewise the Kantian thing-in-itself). (Pearson, 2007, p. 26)

Clearly, the possibility that the subject in any substantial sense may be a purely

metaphysical construct (even in its post-modern incarnations, like Heideggers Dasein or the

topographical psyche of Freud) has far-reaching implications for both philosophy and psychology.

Not least among those implications is the necessity of re-conceiving psychic and behavioral

changes in a non-causal way, for while an objectified subject can be easily and perhaps properly

thought causally, a person conceived existentially as a series of transformative agentic actions or

mental states cannot. Causality, as understood either by Aristotle or by Newton, may serve as an

effective explanatory way of thinking about empirical things and states of affairs, but it does not

serve as effectively for explaining human actions and choices.

A consequence of re-conceiving human being non-subjectively and narratively, is that

changes in self-understanding can be understood and accounted for in much the same way we

understand texts and narrative forms of arthermeneutically and exegetically. And again,

Nietzsche can help us here, since his writings right from the start, attend to the transformative

power of art. The Birth of Tragedy is an extended diatribe on the transformative effects of Greek

myths, tragedies, and sculptures on Greek culture. In both the third and the penultimate sections of


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that text Nietzsche makes the following startling claims, all the more startling if we read them not

as cases of literary hyperbole, but as psychological observations:

Art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of

the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming. The tragic myth, too, insofar as it

belongs to art at all, participates fully in this metaphysical intention of art to transfigure.

(1968, p. 140)

The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and consummation of

existence, seducing one to a continuation of life, was also the cause of the Olympian world

which the Hellenic will made use of as a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the gods justify

the life of man: they themselves live itthe only satisfactory theodicy. (1968, p. 43)

Nietzsches belief, asserted and reasserted throughout his writings and his life, was that our stories

and our art can transform lifenot causally, but narratively. To the degree that we can imagine

and narrate a possibility, we can realize it. So, if and insofar as the self is an incarnate narrative

processalways becoming rather than beingthen that indeterminacy, thought specifically as a

narrative function, can open up futures that no metaphysical subject could produce of itself.

V. Levinas and the Possibility of a Redemptive Interpersonal Time

French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas contribution to this provisional meditation can

only be fully appreciated from the perspective of his early, post-war writings, which are obsessed

with hollowing out the Heideggerian project in such a way as to demonstrate phenomenologically

that the everyday being ofDasein, considered in its care-ful being-in-the-world, its authentic being

toward death, and its ecstatic temporality cannot of itself produce a true futurethat is, a future

that benefits from genuinely new possibilities (possibilities that are not Daseins own, produced


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out of Daseins own existential situation or collection of solitary achievements), and thus, a future

that holds any hope of genuine change or novelty. According to Levinas reading of Heidegger,

Dasein can at most realize possibilities that are destined to it by its thrown situation in the world

and its subsequent choices, and it can realize those possibilities only as its own projects. In other

words, at bottom Dasein suffers from its latent debt to Aristotelian subjectivitylike the acorn

which ineluctably grows into an oak tree, when human being is conceived as of itself and for itself,

it appears as a potentiality only for actualizing its own temporally distended possibilities, the

uttermost of which is its own death, the impossibility of any further possibilities. (Ironically

enough, Aristotles understanding of artistic action as a transformative change enacted by one

being on another being, certainly points toward the Levinasian possibility of thinking self

transformation interpersonally, but neither Heidegger nor Levinas seems to note the significance

of that Aristotelian deployment.) Levinas later texts exploit the Heideggerian problematic by

arguing that interpersonal relations are ontologically fundamentalto the existential constitution of

Dasein understood as ecstatic temporality, and thus, prior to being in the world, as well as to any

conception or realization of self-initiated projects. Hence, according to Levinas, Daseins most

primordial project is not a concern of its own making. It is an ethical concern for the other.

In Existence and Existents and Time and the Other Levinas investigates extraordinary

experiences like insomnia and fatigue to argue that anonymous being is escaped through force of

will, which indeed produces an identity born of power and authenticity (like Heideggers

mineness). Yet insofar as that identity is solitary, deathbound, and vulnerable to every other (as

Hobbes correctly perceived), its existence is a burden to be carried, not a life to be enjoyed. To this

degree, Levinas argument follows the itinerary of French existentialism. Where Levinas diverges

from his existentialist colleagues is in his profound attention to the question of time. Rather than


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simply parry the punctuality of scientific time as does Bergson (and Heidegger after him), by

thinking time as duration (and as ecstatic temporality, in Heideggers case), Levinas moves in the

opposite direction, employing insomnia, fatigue and indolence to articulate the moment as such

and in its existential punctuality. Just as Freud exploits the narrative gaps in dream recitation to

open a place for analytic interpretation, Levinas exploits the momentary gap between being and

having, between action and reification. According to Levinas, this gap is illuminated by lifes

extreme experiencesthose experiences wherein one finds oneself powerless over ones own

being; those experiences wherein one is quite literally an impotent master ofnothing. And as with

the gap at play in Freuds dream analysis, Levinas hypostatic gap breaks the hermetic seal of

subjectivity. It opens onto a beyond and into a dimension that is not of ones own making, the

dimension of an other time in which not only the future, but the past can be determinately

changed.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas specifically targets Heideggers claim that human

existence can be fully and properly understood in terms of care and projective understanding;

human beings act not only in response to needs and projected ends, counters Levinas, but in order

to enjoy the world. Said differently (though Levinas does not couch his discussion in these terms,

nor seem to fully understand this aspect of his own analyses), Heidegger has ignored the aesthetic

dimension of human existence, and particularly the aesthetic nature of interpersonal relations

revealed in physical encounters like a sexual caress. So too, argues Levinas, has Heidegger

misunderstood lifes ethicaldimension. Heidegger sees that others are implicated in my existence

from the start, as evidenced not only by everyday speech and the totality of reference relations that

constitute the world ofpraxis (in which equipment and the shared nature of our worldly tasks

constantly implicate others), but by and through discourse, the linguistic element of both self-


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understanding and the call of conscience to authentic being. And yet, observes Levinas, language

itself testifies to a deeper involvement of others in my existence, an anarchic relationship

reenacted in the turn to others constitutive of any and all speech acts (acts ofsaying), which are

ontologically prior to what is said. Accordingly, Heideggerian being with and alongside others

does not exhaust my interpersonal relations, argues Levinas; rather, those modes of worldly

involvement rest on an ecstatic responsibility every bit as originary as Daseins ecstatic

temporality. For Levinas, the erotic and the paternal are two phenomenal forms that this ecstatic

relation to others can take. Furthermore, says Levinas, I must recognize an ethical responsibility

for others in any call of conscience like that articulated by Heidegger. Guilt and the call of

conscience are not simply summons to authentic being (being for oneself) from Dasein itself in the

midst of everyday involvements and in the mode of the they; they are summons to anarchic

responsibility for the other(and thereby, for theselfthat in its everyday being is a being for the

other).

In Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence, Levinas radicalizes these ethical claims,

rendering selfhood dynamically as a being-subject to the other, a transformed subjectivity so

extreme that even Hegels master-slave dialectic is inadequate to think it. For Levinas, one

experiences true individuality and affirmation only in a substitution for the other that no one else

can perform by proxy. No other father, for instance, can take my place in the relation that obtains

between me and my children. And in that non-equivalency of terms, one realizes an identity that is

neither the identity of enslavement, nor the self-affirmation of solitary subjectivity. But more

importantly, the self that is realized through primordial interpersonal relations is a self whose

future is constantly opened upon novel possibilities and whose past is transformed along with its

future.


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Understanding the existential self as nothing other than the embodied and ecstatic activity

of dramatic self-narration is uniquely compatible with Levinas re-conception of time. If the future

is thought in its relation to the other, then like narrative time, the past is never entirely past,

because it never solidifies into an irrevocable historyit is never written in stone, as it were. Any

postscript or narrative intervention not only supplements the whole, it alters the whole. Hence, the

meaning of the past can be changed at any time by the intervention of a bon motfrom outside,

which (like Nietzsches intervention of art) occasions as a matter of course a revisionary reading

of the narrative from within. Conceiving the self in the light of a future which originates in the

ethical relation rather than in ones own thrown situation and projected possibilities reveals

responses like forgiveness and self-pity to be, not affective states of a passive subject, but

formative choices in the meaning (self-narration) of a persons lifethe life entire, not just the

event in question. This conception might also explain how certain traumas, false memories, post-

hypnotic suggestions and the like can alter for better or worse a persons self-understanding, since

they are nothing less than alterations of the existential narrative that is the meaning and structure of

a persons life. And it would similarly explain why human freedom and agency cannot be properly

understood within the structures of causal thinking and metaphysical subjectivity.

VI. Narrative Therapy

This section of the paper is still in progress. I intend to review some of the more influential

schools of narrative therapy and analyze their successes and failures in the light of a narrative self.

VII. Conclusion

If, as Freudian-indebted psychoanalysts believe and a plethora of research has confirmed,


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the so-called talking cure is an effective therapy for phobias, obsessions, delusions and a wide

range of other select non-physiological mental disorders, then the disorders being remedied might

indeed be best-conceived as talking disorders, as it were (though the use of the word talking

here is not meant to imply a strictly verbal, or even cognitive, understanding of narrative). Said

differently, a narrative-based remedy implies a narrative-based problemor at least a problem

with fundamental narrative components. To the degree that the self or psyche can be determinately

altered for good or ill by narrative forming/transforming influences and procedures, then the self-or

psyche must admit to a narrative co-constitution.

Accordingly, this paper hazards the conclusion that Freuds famous structure of the mind as

an epistemological triumvirate consisting of an Ego, Id and Superego topology might be profitably

reconceived as a constantly scripted and revised narrative, pre-narrative and meta-narrative

tripartite activity. Additionally, it considers that some forms of psychotherapy could be

correlatively conceived as narrative interventions which occasion a self-revision of any or all of the

pre-narrative, narrative and meta-narrative elements continually legislating and constituting the

activity of self-narrationin other words, precisely those elements subject to change and

transformation by logical analyses, myths and folktales, religious discourse, superstitions, cultural

narratives, discourse communities, literature and pulp fiction, popular music, idle talk, peer

evaluation, socially-effected or media-mediated idolization or accusation, self-abnegation, self-

recrimination, pop-psychology, etc. This paper also suggests in conclusion that what affords

psychology a privileged place in this litany of transformative influences can only be its claim to

scientific objectivity and rigor, and for that claim to be realized it must develop and apply in

therapy a hermeneutic method systematically attuned to the constitutive functions of a narratively

structured self.

Anderson-Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of the Narrative Self and Narrative-Based Therapy

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