Narrative Factuality

A Handbook

Monika Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan, Monika Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110484991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The study of narrative—the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology—has been traditionally concerned with the fictional narratives of literature, such as novels or short stories. But narrative is a transdisciplinary and transmedial concept whose manifestations encompass both the fictional and the factual. In this volume, which provides a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe's Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, the use of narrative to convey true and reliable information is systematically explored across media, cultures and disciplines, as well as in its narratological, stylistic, philosophical, and rhetorical dimensions. At a time when the notion of truth has come under attack, it is imperative to reaffirm the commitment to facts of certain types of narrative, and to examine critically the foundations of this commitment. But because it takes a background for a figure to emerge clearly, this book will also explore nonfactual types of narratives, thereby providing insights into the nature of narrative fiction that could not be reached from the narrowly literary perspective of early narratology.

III. Factuality across Disciplines and Media

Factual Narratives and the Real in Therapy and Psychoanalysis

Prof. Dr. Carl Eduard Scheidt

Prof. Dr. Anja Stukenbrock

1. The real, internal and external reality, and the reality principle in psychoanalysis

According to Sigmund Freud in his paper “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1958 [1911]), the development of psychic functions can be organized according to two fundamental principles: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. While he identified the reality principle – the adaptation of humans to a reality or an external environment of sorts – as a constitutive element of psychic development, he understood the pleasure principle as an inherent functional principle of a human nature ruled by drives and a striving for wish fulfillment (1958 [1911]). The reality principle is not identical with external reality but is a principle of mental functioning that refers to the necessity of adapting to such a reality. The ego thus evolves along the boundary between these two antagonistic principles of the reality principle and the pleasure principle. As the psychic structure that mediates between the internal drives and the demands of the external world, the ego is also tasked with continually checking reality. Freud later revisited this idea in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1990 [1920]) where he stated that the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle which

[…] does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure. (7)

The reality principle thus represents the inner entity responsible for ensuring that we adapt to the demands of external reality.

From a historical perspective, Freud developed his first theories on the pathogenesis of neurotic (hysterical) symptoms based on the assumption that mental illness was the direct result of a real experience. This was also the substance of his “seduction theory” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 587–592). In this first version of psychoanalytic theory, external reality played a key role in the cause of neuroses. Today, we know that childhood sexual abuse is highly prevalent in these cases and in fact significantly affects the development of mental disorders. According to recent studies (Plener et al. 2017), two percent of all children and adolescents become victims of sexual abuse, and of those among them who reported cases of abuse, maltreatment or neglect in the six months prior to the assessment, 95.1 % display some form of mental disorder (De Rose et al. 2016). Freud’s assumption that sexual abuse is an important cause of neuroses has therefore been corroborated. What proved more important for the subsequent development of psychoanalysis, however, was the insight that it was often not the event itself that directly caused the psychic symptom, but the inner processes of working through the real experience in the imagination: “In other cases the connection [between trauma and symptom] is not as simple; all that is present is what might be called a symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, a relation such as healthy people form in dreams” (Freud and Breuer 2004 [1893], 9). The connection between the external event and the memory of experiences in the past associated with shame, fear, guilt, and/or disgust thus triggers defense mechanisms that help us to avoid mental anguish, while forming the basis from which the psychic symptom evolves.

2. Reality and the realm of creativity (Donald W. Winnicott)

While Freud’s thinking was characterized by the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle – a constellation in which the reality principle acted as a ‘disciplinarian’ for the drives – later psychoanalytic theories posed the following question: what conditions of mental development are necessary for an emotionally meaningful reference to external reality to evolve in the first place? The differentiation between self and non-self thus became a primary condition for acquiring a sense of reality (Lichtenberg 1983, 56–63). In 1982, Donald W. Winnicott identified an intermediate space between internal and external reality that enables us to create a meaningful relationship between the two:

[…] the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perceptual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (3)

This intermediate area of experience allows us to establish connections between inner and outer reality and is where transitional objects and phenomena belong. These objects stand for the external objects they symbolically represent. According to Winnicott, the referential structure of these transitional objects can be understood as such: a child can create a transitional object, provided it already has a living internal object, and provided this internal object is ‘good enough.’ The internal object and its qualities are defined by the existence, aliveness, and behavior of the external (real) object. The internal object is thus not primarily defined by the child’s imagination, as assumed by other psychoanalytic theorists (such as Melanie Klein). Rather, it depends on the quality of the real object experience. If the external object fails on an essential level, this will result in the internal object becoming ‘dead’ or ‘persecutory,’ in which case it loses its significance for the child. Then, and only then, does the transitional object also become meaningless and empty for the child. The transitional object thus refers indirectly to the perception of an external object: It is the representation of the quality of the internal object that was formed through the child’s real experience with an external object (Winnicott 1982, 11).

In his work “Playing: A Theoretical Statement” Winnicott expands his idea of the transitional object into the idea of a “potential space” (1982, 44–61). This refers to the space within the relationship between mother and baby that can be separated from the internal world on the one side and the external world on the other; it is where playing and creativity are located (1982, 48):

The important part of this concept is that whereas inner psychic reality has a kind of location in the mind or in the belly or in the head or somewhere within the bounds of the individual’s personality, and whereas what is called external reality is located outside those bounds of the individual’s personality, playing and cultural experience can be given a location if one uses the concept of the potential space between the mother and the baby. (62)

An analogy can thus be drawn between the representational structure of the transitional space according to Winnicott and the referentiality of fictional texts, as opposed to factual texts. Just as transitional objects refer to a world of internal objects that indirectly indicate the quality of external objects, we could propose the hypothesis that fictional texts also primarily refer to a world of internal objects, or an internal reality. The quality of this reality, however, reflects the characteristics of external objects. Without the possibility of creating a relation between internal and external reality in a transitional space, external reality remains dead and lifeless. Therefore, successful fictions originate in the realm of creativity, while keeping the transitional space open, enlivening and enriching it. In addition, the epistemic dimension of fictional texts could be understood as questioning the distinction between phantasy and reality, between internal and external space. Winnicott’s theory of transitional space focuses less on this epistemic dimension, however, and more on the development of the mental ability to create a meaningful emotional connection between the self and the world – a connection he believed to be founded on early object experiences.

The absolute dominance of reality in thought and experience can also be a factor in psychopathology. People who cling to external reality in an extreme manner can no longer take a constructivist approach to the question of how close to reality their narratives actually are. For instance, if their depiction of reality is referred to as the result of a certain perspective, they interpret this as a challenge and a form of attack. The liveliness that grows out of the ambiguity of language is lost in such cases. When experience is too strongly anchored in external reality, the connection to potential space – the realm of creativity – is broken (Winnicott 1982, 78). This phenomenon has also been referred to in psychoanalytic literature as alexithymia, or “pensée opératoire,” by Marty and de M’Uzan (1978, 977) and describes a mechanical and automaton-like way of thinking and feeling that is no longer connected to unconscious phantasies and emotional experiences, but has instead become ossified and lifeless. Hence, the reference to external reality is still present – albeit hypertrophied to a certain extent –, but it has become alienated as a result of the perception of reality, including social reality, only in terms of categories of things.

3. The real as the core of the subject (Jacques Lacan)

According to Jacques Lacan (1982 [1975]), the child enters the world of the imaginary in the mirror stage, when it first sees its own image as a whole in the mirror. Through the child’s realization of the (apparent) wholeness of itself, the disparate and fragmented core of its subject is formed into the ego. This world of the imaginary, within which the ego evolves as a whole, fundamentally represents a transformation of the subject – of its original diversity and fragmentation – and follows the desire for unification and completion. The mirror image, or the child’s identification with the mirror image, thus conveys the ideas of the unity of its body and the ability to control its world. It is the foundation of all future identifications and of the ego within the order of the imaginary. For Lacan, the child’s early experience of the body’s fragmentation and helplessness (corps morcelé) represents the real against which the ego develops as a defensive structure (Muller 1982, 235):

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form […] to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (Lacan 1982 [1975], 5, emphasis in original).

While Freud also explored the idea of the ego as a defensive structure and regarded the external world as something that the child must adapt to (reality principle) and thus as a stimulus for constraining the pleasure principle, Laca...