Lighting the Way: The Temporal Dimension of Narrative in Psychotherapy

Abstract

^ Lighting the Way: The Temporal Dimension of Narrative in Psychotherapy Jan Marta Classical psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of the past. It assumes that the memories recounted in therapy sessions are screen memories of earlier, more determinant ones; it questions the stated motivations and feelings (or manifest content of the sessions) as a present defense against past unconscious sexual trauma; and it anchors, with the weight of the past, the fantasies expressed for the future. Two major classical psychoanalytic beliefs about time, the determinism of the past and temporal linearity, inform this type of interpretation. But this temporal view forecloses the contribution to the analysis of the present and the future, and prematurely closes, during the time of the therapy, the way of the future. What are the dangers of this foreclosure? How might one open the discourse of psychotherapy to the present and an infinitely regressing future? To what advantage? How can time be used to help patients move beyond their hurt and disappointment? In this article I explore the potential of literature and literary theory and methodology to illuminate the discourses of psychoanalytic theory and psychotherapy practice, with specific reference to the temporal dimension of narrative in psychoanalytic discourse. More particularly , I use Gérard Genette's literary theory and methodology, as elaborated in Figures III, to shed a powerful light on the temporal dimension of narrative in psychoanalytic or psychotherapy discourse.1 I examine the determinism of the past and the linearity of time in theoretical, literary, and clinical texts. In D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, hysteria is prophecy, not lunacy, and determinism is undermined, indeed overthrown . In Marie Cardinal's The Words to Say It, repetition and poetic association subvert any strictly linear ordering of the psychoanalytic process. After illuminating through Genette's theory and methodology Literature and Medicine 13, no. 1 (Spring 1994) 143-157 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 144 THE TEMPORAL DIMENSION OF NARRATIVE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY the means by which these two literary narratives so effectively challenge classical psychoanalytic notions of time, I use Genette's work to elucidate the temporal structure of two excerpts from a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy2 Like their literary counterparts, the first excerpt emphasizes the importance of the future, and the second highlights the nonlinearity of time. My analyses of both excerpts demonstrate the therapeutic value of attunement to the temporal dimension of narrative in psychotherapy and the role of Genette's theory in creating that awareness of time, with implications for the theory, research, and practice of clinical, life, and literary narratives. First, however, I must elaborate on notions of time in classical psychoanalytic discourse. In An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis Charles Brenner states clearly the two fundamental hypotheses of psychoanalysis: "the principle of psychic determinism, or causality, and the proposition that consciousness is an exceptional rather than a regular attribute of psychic processes";3 in other words, the psychic determinism of human experience and the existence and determinism of the unconscious. His explanations of the first fundamental hypothesis make clear the overriding importance for psychoanalysis of the past, both in the present and for the future: Let us start with the principle of psychic determinism. The sense of this principle is that in the mind, as in physical nature about us, nothing happens by chance, or in a random way. Each psychic event is determined by the ones which preceded it. Events in our mental lives that may seem to be random and unrelated to what went on before are only apparently so. In fact, mental phenomena are no more capable of such a lack of causal connection with what preceded them than are physical ones. Discontinuity in this sense does not exist in mental life.4 This determinism of the past applies to everyday life and, as Brenner illustrates, to psychopathology. This first hypothesis or principle, that of psychic determinism, is connected to the second, "the existence and significance" of the unconscious : In fact, the relation between these two hypotheses is so intimate that one can hardly discuss the one without bringing in the other also. It is precisely the fact that so much of what goes on in our Jan Marta 145...