ABSTRACT

Coherence, whether in our sense of ourselves or of the external world, is repeatedly shaped and reshaped, found and lost again; it remains forever a movement and never an achieved status. Categories of interpretation then, in and out of psychoanalysis, shift and are up for grabs. Parallel developments have occurred in literature, painting and sculpture. Psychoanalysis, too, has changed in its modes of understanding and interpreting human experience over the last hundred years. It may be claimed that only in 19th-century psychoanalysis, which aspired to the mechanistic model of science established by physics, and which originated in a hypnotic, medical conception of the clinical relationship, is psychoanalytic truth dependent on referents external to the analytic event itself for validation. Spence's proposal of a narrative structure arises from an academic tradition that thrives in the classroom and it is understandably an intellectual approach.