ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts may be described as people who listen to the narrations of analysands and help them to transform these narrations into others that are more complete, coherent, convincing, and adaptively useful than those they have been accustomed to constructing. Psychoanalysts say that, unconsciously, one always takes things literally, whether one has consciously decided to do so or not; in working as an analyst, however, one decides to do so deliberately. Constructing narratives in psychoanalysis is not limited to inventing or repeating disclaimers and excessive claims of action. In the psychoanalytic retelling, there is no right and wrong in free-associating. As narratives concerning the self make up a large portion of these analytic tales, and as the self figures ever more prominently in clinical and theoretical discourse, it should be useful to analyze further these self-narrations. Narration has been defined “most minimally as verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened”.
