ABSTRACT
A good case can be made that a clear-cut victory for narrative theory would amount to the first successful paradigm shift within orthodox psychoanalysis. By no means are narrative theorists the first to attack the metapsychology or to complain about the distortions introduced by positivism but, in the past, schism, not revision, has been the result. The reasons for this are probably as much sociological and institutional as they are intellectual Nevertheless; the temptation is best resisted to begin the discussion with such familiar phrases as paradigm shift, revolutionary science. As Sass and Woolfolk emphasized, Spence assumed that the narrative qualities of a patients productions are later additions to or transformations of historical truth. It is worth noting the contrasting ways in which non-narrative material is conceived. Many of the arguments against the language of causality in psychoanalysis can be found in Wittgenstein's remarks on Freud, made in the 1930s and 1940s.
