ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence on the clinical situation of what Donald Spence called "the narrative tradition". It discusses the "narrative pull", referring less to a tradition per se than to a fundamental way humans format their movements through the world. The chapter provides the "narrative tradition" proper, Spence's original designation, referring to a culture of psychoanalytic telling that has developed over the last 100 years somewhat independently of theory, influenced first by telling situations in the culture and second by psychoanalytic case studies, academic training programs and the public presentations of therapists. It conceptualizes the narrative world of the dyad as an instantiation of the narrative tradition of psychoanalysis worked out between a particular analyst and a particular patient. The world of a psychoanalytic dyad is akin to the world of the novel, a unique example of a genre that depends on a shared knowledge of the literary or psychoanalytic zeitgeist.
