ABSTRACT
I had been thinking about the problem of narrative in psychoanalysis for some time when I ran across a television screening of The Incredible Shrinking Man, a B movie scripted by the science fiction writer Richard Matheson and released in 1957. I had not seen the film for almost 40 years, but I remembered it fondly enough to see if it held up. I imagined that immersing myself again in the atmosphere of one of those awful, innocent 1950s science fiction movies would be nostalgic. Unexpectedly, it was a good deal more than that, and not only because the movie was better than I understood when I first saw it. I had long felt that new narrative in psychoanalysis is not simply the outcome of the analyst’s objective interpretation, as Schafer (1983, 1992) and Spence (1982, 1987) portrayed it, but is instead the unbidden outcome of unconscious aspects of clinical process. Oddly enough, by helping to direct and cohere my thoughts on this point, The Incredible Shrinking Man jump-started the Interpersonal/ Relational psychoanalytic understanding of narrative construction I offer in this chapter. The understanding I present, though, is based not only in a certain kind of theory; it is also rooted in a personal sense of clinical process. And so the tone I have adopted is personal as well. This chapter should probably be read as a statement of convictions; but I maintain the hope that my convictions will resonate with the reader’s own.
