Narrative and Meaning

The Foundation of Mind, Creativity, and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Frank M. Lachmann, James L. Fosshage, Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Frank M. Lachmann, James L. Fosshage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138638006
• eBook ISBN: 9781351793346
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychische Gesundheit in der Psychologie

Narrative and Meaning examines the role of both in contemporary psychoanalytic practice, bringing together a distinguished group of contributors from across the intersubjective, relational, and interpersonal schools of psychoanalytic thought.

The contributions propose that narratives or stories in a variety of non-verbal and verbal forms are the foundation of mind, creativity, and the clinical dialogue. From the beginning of life, human experience gains expression through the integration of perception, cognition, memory and affect into mini or complex narratives. This core proposal is illustrated in chapters referencing creativity, psychoanalytic process, gesture, and sensory-motor activity, dreams, music, conflicting narratives in couples, imaginative stories of adopted children, identity, and individuality.

Including a major revision in theory based upon an expanded definition of narrative, this book is an essential read for any contemporary psychoanalyst wishing to use narrative in their practice. Featuring essential theory and a wealth of practical clinical material, Narrative and Meaning will appeal greatly to both psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

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Chapter 1
Narrative and meaning

Our story begins

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, MD

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Our book is a narrative about narratives and the profound meaning stories provide for human life. Our chapters tell stories about narratives that give expression to all our meaningful lived experiences. Some narratives are science stories. They begin with a hypothesis, provide research evidence, and draw conclusions—that is meanings. Some narratives are mini-plots of neonates and infants—non-verbal imagistic portrayals of immediate experience. Some narratives are body motor activities—or songs—or math formulations. Some narratives portray sessions of analyst and analysand working together—stories in words, feelings, fantasies, reveries, gestures, facial expressions, body movements, and body sensations. Some narratives of the analyst are theory based. Some narratives of analyst and analysand are based on simple and complex inferences.

The opening chapter uses a series of different stories to establish our main assertion—narratives are the building blocks of the development of the human psyche. This is not an entirely new conception. What is more radical is our proposal that through narrative lived experience is organized more holistically, more integrated than conventionally portrayed. And still more of a surprising story—neonates and infants form mini-stories of their micro-experiences. Stated differently, forming a narrative depicting lived experience in infancy begins as no more an intention than breathing, seeing, or hearing; it is an inherent emergent product of human evolution. So in the opening chapter we will identify a series of mini-stories that we hope build to a broad conclusion—the significance of narrative in early life. We will describe what we mean by meaning and compare the traditional concept of representation with what we mean by narrative. We will demonstrate how our proposals apply to a clinical session. In subsequent chapters, the examples of narrative usage will be more focused.

Preview of the story to be told

Narratives are the building blocks of development. Narratives are the means by which experience, as it is lived, is felt, noted, and encoded. Narratives give development a sense of temporality, continuity, permutation, and cohesion. Through narrative, experiences, especially of the sense of self, take on the quality that, like Paris, the more it changes, the more it is the same.

Experience as each individual lives it within the influence of his or her surround is a central subject of contemporary psychoanalysis. A traditional method of conceptualizing lived experience has been to describe the activity of perception, affect, memory, cognition, and symbolization as separate functional systems. More recent explanatory models of psychic functioning employ system and organizational integrative theories more suited to capture intrapsychic, intersubjective, and cultural fields. We propose that, as it is lived, experience is not fragmented into separate functional systems but is organized, synthesized, and given holistic expression through narratives that are created using many forms of symbolization. If we use the vernacular and ask someone “What’s your story?” he might answer in words, she in song, he in gesture and body language, she by dancing, he with a drawing, she by providing her address and cellphone number. Our goal is to explore the significance of narratives throughout life and to demonstrate the integral relationship between lived experience, narrative, creativity, and meaning.

The creation and transformations of a multiplicity of narratives are central to development. Additionally, discovering and creating a coherent narrative truth about the individual’s lived experience facilitates therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. Narratives, as we will describe them, capture both the implicit and explicit aspects of lived experience—what is in awareness, what is on the edge of awareness, what has been formulated and what is potentially formulatable. Consequently, narratives have an integral relationship with the individual’s sense of meaning whether moment to moment or over widely varied periods of time. Each event that has the impact potential to activate an affect, intention, and goal will become symbolized into a narrative that has meaning for the individual’s adaptation. We will expand the range of symbolization from familiar symbolic systems—imagistic, verbal, mathematical, and musical—to include modes of encoding sensorimotor experience (movement, body sensation).

Supporting narratives

Narratives start “with the implicit dramas enacted between infant and parent, the regulation/rupture/repair cycles described by Beebe and Lachmann (1994) as well as the ‘lived stories’ described by Stern (2004), and culminating in the production of life narratives” (Goldin, 2014, p. 256).

We are stories, our accounts of what has happened to us. It is not our memories alone that sustain a sense of personhood. The past is too multifaceted and full of details. To have a self, we need a protagonist, someone who does things and to whom things happen. The past needs to be organized into a narrative, or several alternate narratives. No stories, no self.

(Mitchell, 2002, p. 145)

Our approach both utilizes and challenges the brilliant rendering of Modell’s delineation of metaphoric processes. We also build on Stern’s (1985, 1990) research (diary) of a baby’s experience, that of other infant studies, on Schafer (1992), Spence (1982), and other rich portrayals of the use of narrative in clinical undertakings, on Frank and LaBarre (2011) on movement, and on Bruner’s (1990, 2011) Acts of Meaning.

What do we mean by meaning? The story of the marriage of narrative and meaning

When we say some event, interaction, intention, movement, or sensation was a meaningful experience, what gives the “experience” the quality of meaningfulness? We recognize many explicit and implicit factors that delineate the quality of having meaning. An essential factor needed for an occurrence to have meaning is that the event or sensation activates one or more of a wide variety of discrete emotions, physiological states, and/or sensory impressions. Equally significant is that the occurrence serves a recognizable purpose such as providing useful information for bodily functions and for living in the world adaptively. The occurrence also has meaning if it contributes to the individual’s effectively attaching securely to individuals and affiliating with groups. Opportunities to explore and achieve efficacy, competence, and mastery in a complex network of tasks and pastimes are especially meaningful for adaptation. In addition, an event and interaction has meaning if it contributes to a person’s self-enhancement, empathic sensitivity, and/or altruistic inclination. We can also recognize a meaningful experience if the event, interaction or sensation triggers imagination, fantasy, creativity, and an enhanced sense of purpose. Along with occurrences that trigger positively toned adaptive intentions, occurrences that lead to aversive responses and affects that activate antagonism and protective withdrawal have important meaning. Psycho analytic theory has consistently emphasized the important meaning to an individual of sensual pleasure and sexual excitement as well as the threat of impotence and sexual dysfunction, but often has understated the meaning of power and dominance and the threat of loss of agency and feelings of helplessness.

In psychoanalytic inquiries, meaning has a temporal factor: what is the significance or implication of an experience at the time of its first occurrence? And what is the later meaning of the experience? How has it influenced further development and been modified by subsequent experience?

1 At the time of occurrence—key word: “impact”. Does this occurrence, event, happening, or physiological alteration activate an experience that impacts the psyche? If so it has an immediate meaning for the individual. By impact, we mean an affect is aroused and some form of encoding takes place. The encoding may or may not lead to the emergence of a narrative.

2 The time subsequent—key word: “influence”. What are the subsequent effects of the self state alteration, memory, and/or narrative? What expectations are established that then influence further affects, intentions, goals, and responses?

3 Looking back from subsequent developmental influences we can ask what meaning did the original experience have? Especially when a narrative has formed, reflection often leads to the recognition and emergence of complex meanings that delineate a sense of life’s purpose.

4 Looking back we can ask did an earlier narrative influence subsequent intentions and responses in a manner concordant with other adaptive or maladaptive patterns of motivations and responses. Did development then move along an existing trajectory or did a modified or maladaptive pattern develop? In the instance in which the original experience and the narrative that was formed were not concordant did it then establish or add to an alternative pathway? Rather than concordant or compatible, was the influence in opposition to other patterns? Did it establish or add to one or more conflictual pathways?

Narrative conceptualized as an integrative process of meaningful lived experience

We can describe each original or subsequent meaningful lived experience as involving components of perception, cognition, memory, and affect or we can presume the formation of one or more integrated patterns—what we will describe as “narratives”. What constitutes a meaningful lived experience? A happening happens, a now moment begins: a murmur, a hum, a stir, an inclination, a tendency, a plan/decision/action that responds to an immediate expectation of self and others or reflects a routine/ritual, or a compulsion/obsession/addiction.

Each meaningful experience has the potential to be communicated to the self and others through a narrative. Each narrative not only gives representation to the experience but also has the potential of deepening the meaning through metaphoric linkage.

The entrapment of words: a story of the limitations of language

To understand what we mean by meaning, we use words. As Homo sapiens (over the age of one) we use verbal symbols to communicate our desires, thoughts, and feelings to others and to ourselves. As Homo sapiens at any age, we experience meaning through a variety of symbolic systems. Each symbolic system has advantages for presenting an enlivened representation of an experience. The imagistic, sensorimotor, verbal, mathematical, and musical symbolic systems each activate affect and provide the guidance for relatedness, pleasure, power, and safety required to function in a complex world of interpersonal, communal, and inanimate contexts and challenges. Little further need be said about the evolutionary gain from mankind’s acquisition of verbal symbolism for building the complex societies, scientific endeavors, and personal, political, and cultural relatedness of our sophisticated world.

But verbal designation has its limits as a rendering of the full richness of experience and meaning. The language we use to describe the processes of neuroscience puts us at a distance from the language we use to describe lived experience and using language to describe lived experience puts us at a distance from the full richness of that experience. This states a broad problem with language usage. We recognize that our choice of narrative as a designator for a variety of both non-verbal and verbal experience introduces potential confusion with narrative’s more usually restricted connotation. In ordinary usage narrative addresses verbal stories. Here we broaden narrative to encompass the experience of imagistic, auditory, body movement, and body sensation stories for both the pre-verbal infant and the individual throughout life. We want narrative to include the multisensory aspect of many experiences as well as a suggestion of a hum of meaning that precedes, represents, and accompanies many implicit and explicit experiences. As we use words to convey the presumed “narratives” of pre-verbal infants we recognize Daniel Stern’s recognition that “There are enormous gains and enormous losses with the advent of language” (1985, p. 178). Stern points to the loss of the force and wholeness of original experience.

Despite the limitation of any word to convey the fullness of lived experience, we believe that narrative is an optimal designator for the means by which implicit and explicit experience is organized. The challenge we face in making our assertion is that we must use words to argue for “narrative”—even in pre-verbal infants. Narrative in general usage connotes a story with elements of complexity while our usage includes a story as simple as “a familiar face is approaching—pleasure” or “a familiar face is being unresponsive—uncertainty, confusion, aversion” (the still face experiment [Tronick et al., 1978]). Or we can use a narrative to explain what is transpiring in the psyches of non-verbal animals. For example, from wherever he was in the house, my (JL) dog would come to be near the door near the time of my coming home. Then when he heard the car he would alert when I was two blocks away. Tail wagging he would be first to greet me to be petted. The presumed dog’s narrative: it’s time, he’s coming—arousal. He is near—excitement. Hello I am so glad to see you and get your loving attention–affection.

Narrative and metaphor: a story of the enrichment of language

If this proposal of narrative as the central organizer of an integrated experience is accepted, how do we relate and compare it to “metaphoric process” as proposed by Modell (2005) and utilized effectively by others (Katz, 2013). Metaphoric process explains how the human (and animal) mind makes linkages and connections that are essential for constructive and creative endeavors—both relational and more generally adaptive in functioning in the world. Use your metaphoric capacity to imagine a driver and passenger having a lively conversation. They share memories of previous trips building on each other’s associations and make plans for this trip. Then suddenly the car in front veers crazily. A different form of cognition is instantly needed—a form we call procedural memory—that would be better designated as an organized embodied motor narrative. A linear narrative: hit the break, turn the wheel, and get into the other lane– is called for. For survival the linear narrative and its emotional alarm must replace the conversational metaphoric narrative. Or less dramatic, a teacher is attempting to teach elementary school students simple arithmetic. When she says—listen, concentrate, focus on these numbers, she is saying the narrative you need now is not associative but concrete. Later a highly complex narrative based on metaphoric process using mathematical symbolization will be needed. To summarize, we are using words to distinguish between designators and to make the point—narrative is the broader designator. Narratives may be more or less metaphoric or more or less linear and concrete. Some combination—more or less metaphoric or concrete—may be adaptive or maladaptive.

Representation and narrative: the dynamic thrust of stories

From Freud to the present, representation has been the consistent psychoanalytic concept used to account for the encoding and internalizing of experience. As new ways to conceptualize mental functioning have emerged the meaning of representation has shifted. Freud focused on “regard for representability” (1900, p. 548) to explain “the means by which dreams represent the relations between the dream-thoughts” (p. 339). In this usage representation refers to the conventional meaning of how does one entity stand-for, that is represent another.

When analytic theory moved from a focus on topography to the complexity of the structural hypothesis, internalization, especially of memory, required an account of how a representational world (Sandler and Rosenblatt, 1962) became a component of psychic structure. Memories of specific events, relationships, and didactic learning are laid down principally in the ego and as prohibitions and guides in the superego. The representation of the figures (objects) in affective events, particularly Oedipal strivings and traumas, may be repressed and can emerge as projections (transferences). The re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Narrative and meaning
• 2 The dialogic nature of narrative in creativity and the clinical exchange1
• 3 Resilience, seeking, and narratives about the self
• 4 Music as narrative
• 5 The dream narrative
• 6 Narrative tradition
• 7 Storying suffering of every conceivable sort
• 8 The Ghost Kingdom
• 9 At the edge of the knowable
• 10 Narrative contributions to the core sense of self, identity, and individuality
• Index