ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic theorists of different persuasions have employed different interpretive principles or codes—one might say different narrative structures—to develop their ways of doing analysis and telling about it. In order to carry through this project, one must, first of all, accept the proposition that there are no objective, autonomous, or pure psychoanalytic data which, as Sigmund Freud was fond of saying, compel one to draw certain conclusions. In the traditional transference narration, one tells how the analysand is repetitively reliving or reexperiencing the past in the present relationship with the analyst. The psychoanalytic dialogue is characterized most of all by its organization in terms and of the psychoanalytic relationship. Traditionally, the official psychoanalytic conception of reality has been straightforwardly positivistic. Psychoanalytic researchers have always aimed to develop a normative, continuous psychoanalytic life history that begins with day one, to be used by the psychoanalyst as a guide for participating in the analytic dialogue.
