ABSTRACT

NARRATIVE RIGHTS Within the span of two short sentences, Freud posits, anticipates, and defends the existence of the unconscious. “It” irrupts by way of inexplicable mistakes, stray thoughts, and unaccountable wishes and meets with conscious objections. The unconscious taunts intentions and defies justification. It forces the affected ego to reply with repression, one of its many mechanisms of defense. With Freud’s presentation of the unconscious,

neither experience nor its meaning could be settled. Their estrangement transforms the project of psychoanalysis from that of deciphering the unconscious into creating the conditions for the right for narrative, considered today as an expression of human freedom, as the grounds for imagination and, for many, as the reason why we have education at all.