ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the ways psychoanalysis encourages to think about and work with peoples’ stories, and some of the pitfalls inherent in those ways. S. Freud’s belief in the rights and wrongs of things was rooted in his scientific background and the prevailing culture of rational, objective proof. In Freud’s world, the analyst is likened to a surgeon who needs to put aside his own feelings in order to concentrate on the task in hand, and elsewhere to an archaeologist who objectively reconstructs the past from fragments of recovered material. The image of surgical objectivity has been replaced by acceptance of the therapist’s subjectivity as a vital part of the analytic process. The factual, noun-like authority of the scientific, mechanistic, and objective that dominated earlier psychoanalytic theory has given way to less clear-edged descriptions of mutuality, receptivity, reverie, intuition.
