ABSTRACT
Literary and historiographical scholars have come to view the writing of autobiography and memoirs as a creative opportunity; each provides the writer with an occasion for further self-fashioning. Taking one’s past for a subject allows for extensive reconstructing of memories. Freud’s writings show that he recognized that psychoanalytic causality is not predictive; it is postdictive, in which respect its accounts of normal and abnormal development, however persuasive, must be regarded as underdetermined. Like “action,” “narration” can be construed in a broad sense. One need not use the concept narration in its conventional narrow sense of telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end; instead, one may use narration to designate the telling of anything. As with actions under a description, no question of conventionally understood truth or fiction is implied in taking this conceptual step. A narrative view of the analytic process is not an alternative to an action view.
