ABSTRACT
The paper I am about to read is one I have given before and it presents me with a dilemma which I shall now explain. It is in fact part of a chapter of a doctoral thesis written more than a quarter of a century ago; and it is my intention to read it in its original, that is to say, unrevised form. To be sure, I could not, or should not, have written it in this form now. Which is to say it is scarcely to be judged now as a case history, even less as a scientific paper. I now like to think of it as a story, though if anyone had suggested that to me when I wrote it I should have bristled with indignation. This was written before I trained as a psychoanalyst and I did not then appreciate the everlasting importance and strength of the story. Modern medicine came to abjure the story generally under the contemptuous and dismissive epithet, 'anecdotal evidence', which, however statistically justified, diverts attention away from the central importance to everyone of us, as to every patient, of his own story. Much of the business of psychoanalysis is to help the patient to find a story in the first place, and then one with which he can live. Pirandello's most celebrated play. Six characters in search of an author, does, in some sense, illustrate this; but the quotation I most cherish is that of Isaac Bashevis Singer who said. 'The story is everything. If the Iliad had come to us a commentary by Marx or as an interpretation by Freud, nobody would read it.' In another context he said, 'A story must be a love story. Many writers have attempted to write a story which is not a love story and they have always failed.'
