Parker, I. (2003) Psychoanalytic narratives: Writing the self into contemporary cultural
phenomena, Narrative Inquiry, 13 (2), pp. 301-315.
Psychoanalytic narratives:
Writing the self into contemporary cultural phenomena
Ian Parker
In this article I develop a reading of psychoanalytic narratives in Western culture in such a
way as to embed myself in those narratives and to take a critical distance from them. I
draw upon work in the field of critical discursive psychology to question the way
psychological discourse frames reflection, understanding and experience of culture and
identity in contemporary culture. The focus of this paper, then, is how psychoanalytic
narratives organize subjectivity, here with a particular emphasis on Lacanian motifs. The
methodological impulse of the paper is to draw attention to the nature of narrative in
psychology as contradictory and indeterminate and to evoke that necessary variability in
forms of writing about psychology in culture. Two narrative vignettes on language and
learning illustrate how we might develop a way of writing that connects internal space
and the social realm, and to reflexively ground the researcher in the space that constitutes
both. (Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Discourse, Culture, Writing, Lacan)
INTRODUCTION
In my book Psychoanalytic Culture (Parker, 1997), I argued that psychoanalysis is not
universally true but has become effective through forms of talk and practice. There I used
the methodological device of the ‘discursive complex’ to capture the way psychoanalytic
notions structure subjectivity. Discursive complexes as double-sided templates of
narrative and shapes of experience are necessarily implicated in the ‘psychological
complex’ of which psychology, psychiatry and research into subjectivity are a part (Rose,
1985). What I want to do here is a little different. I am trying to develop a reflection on
the way we are embedded in narrative and how to write the researcher into the account. I
have been very cautious, perhaps too cautious, but I am reaching toward a method that
tries to connect internal space and the social realm and that reflexively grounds the
researcher in the space that constitutes both.
In recent years debates over the role of discourse in psychology have led to a turn
to language and then to discourse analysis, and the most radical forms of discourse
analysis have focused on how psychological discourse creates the very subjects it
pretends to discover (Parker, 1992, 2002). Discourse in this kind of research is seen as a
practice that opens a space for certain kinds of selves, a practice that is not restricted to
speaking and writing but that organizes our bodies in institutions through which we then
open ourselves to the examination of psychological experts (Burman et al., 1996). The
most recent work on ‘narrative’ in psychology homes in on the specific way personal life
stories are deployed, and this has also permitted a further reflection on our work as a
practice embedded in forms of culture (for example Squire, 2000). One might see the
more critical strand of discursive research as mapping the conditions of possibility for
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ways of speaking, and the study of narrative as a detailed explication of how people
develop their own path through the terrain of discourse. This work then demands a new
role for critical psychologists in which they become ethnographers of the self (Griffin,
2000). Traditional laboratory-experimental paradigm psychologists like to keep those they
study at a distance, and Griffin is not claiming that it would be much more than a very
limited step forward than if we were simply to replace the manipulation of ‘subjects’ in
experiments with close observation of them in kinds of ethnography. Qualitative research
outside psychology, however, poses specific urgent questions to critical narrative
psychologists about how they might turn their work into a self-embedded practice in
which they become ‘autoethnographers’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2000).
Psychoanalysis poses particular challenges to qualitative research because
‘psychoanalytic narrative’ is already woven into the texture of Western culture (Parker,
1997). When we ‘rewrite’ a psychoanalytic narrative in research, then, we must produce
something that also critically reflects on that form of narrative. How might we employ
psychoanalytic writing in this way? There are two aspects of the task we need to attend to.
One concerns our theoretical reading and writing of psychoanalytic theory. The other
concerns the experiential process of our work as we read and write a psychoanalytic
account. This would mean that what we read and write about psychoanalysis is:
1.
not only ‘about’ psychoanalysis, but working within psychoanalytic
reasoning, inhabiting it and turning it into a form of cultural critique;
2.
not taking psychoanalysis as a privileged system of knowledge which
comes from the outside and unlocks the secrets of culture, but recognizing
psychoanalysis as embedded in the culture;
3.
not treating psychoanalysis as a mysterious metanarrative but treating it as
an historically material product and resource, as the tool and result of
critical inquiry;
4.
not treating psychoanalysis as a disconnected expert system but as a form
of narrative that is accessible to, and accessed by the selves created by it;
5.
not treating psychoanalysis simply as a clinical practice devoted to the
amelioration of symptoms, but as a system of symptoms which is
structured by and which structures culture.
I want to give an example of reading and writing psychoanalytically which attempts this
process. That is, a way of reading cultural forms that has a psychological effect, a way of
reading that treats them as narrative, and that treats the methodological device of
psychoanalysis itself as narrative. This process requires a mode of subjective engagement
and address to the reader that speaks of a pattern of experience that they may recognize
and resonate with, and so it aims to be ‘writing as a method of knowing’ (Richardson,
2000, p. 940). I write about psychoanalysis as a form of narrative in a way that locates me
inside it that externalizes it rather than treating it as something inside me.
The first vignette reflects on language, and here my writing about language aims
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to bring out something of the subjective shape of the speaking being that emerges in
Western culture through the process of learning another language. Here you will see
played out in the writing my preoccupation with psychoanalysis in discourse, and how
psychoanalytic subjectivity is relayed to subjects who speak within the discourse of
Western culture. I hope to trace a personal narrative through psychoanalytic discourse that
speaks to the ‘narrative’ aspect of the research while illuminating something of the
discursive conditions of possibility for that narrative.
ANOTHER LANGUAGE
Many people in Britain face the task of speaking something other than English with a
great deal of trepidation. Unlike the majority of the world’s population, which speaks
more than one language as a matter of course, we find the experience bewildering. And
that bewilderment is part of the helplessness that characterises a position all too familiar
to all of us; as we stumble over unfamiliar words and phrases we are once again
infantilised, put in the position of the ‘infans’, one without speech. Stereotypical accounts
of Japanese children in the English imagination, that they are silent in class and only
speak when they have fully mastered a new language, function as a further reminder that
regression to the level of the child who cannot help but display its inability will be the
fate meted out to us as we learn another language, here and now.
Psychoanalysis might be useful to make sense of this, and varieties of
psychoanalysis that have emphasised the role of language in the development of the
unconscious - Lacanian analysis in particular - should have something worthwhile to say.
There are five ways it does.
First, another language is another symbolic system. To be in another language is
to be in a symbolic space, but space that feels buoyant enough to hold us as we float
through it. When we are flattered enough by native speakers that our accent is perfect and
that we are perfectly comprehensible to them, there can be moments of ecstatic,
omnipotent illusory freedom. This way of being stretches, exaggerates the experience of
learning and being in language generally. But what do you lose when you learn another
language? The words you choose are only almost right or just too imprecise. We notice,
as we grasp for a representation of something we want to convey to others, that language
is misleading, that it does things and re-presents the world and experience in ways that
always must misrepresent it. We notice, as we try to bring something to life in words that
feel too clumsy, heavy and dead, that the word is the murder of the thing.
When we return from a place that speaks another language to us and through us,
and we have swum through it for a while, choking and then breathing it because our first
language will not work, we stumble a little when back in English because now these
words are, just for a moment, unfamiliar to us. But we also at that moment have a jubilant
sense of mastery over our image of what the other language was like.
Second, another language is a mediated communication with others. To speak to
another in their language is to participate in two processes. It is both to attempt to convey
a message through a murky medium which seems to have a life of its own, and to engage
in the activity of communication in which another is reaching across to you and pulling
you into something that you only imperfectly understand. Speech usually feels as if it is
an immediate direct act of connection and relay of sense to another, but speaking in
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another language shows us how mediated and indirect it really is. A nightmare, but this
was real. I stood and spoke a sentence in the clattering cafeteria of a hotel on the coast of
Montenegro, the unlikely setting for the opening session of the conference, and then I
waited while it was translated into Serbian. While I waited I watched an audience that
became increasingly restive. Each space between my sentences gave me another
opportunity to watch people sigh with irritation. Some muttered as their neighbours
shushed them and some left, and some, my friends, leant forward in encouragement. The
pained look on their faces made it clear to me that the words I sent were different from
the ones that eventually arrived, or perhaps I didn’t even know now what the words I sent
meant. Each sentence on the page was pulled up and out and made its way interminably
via the interpreter into the hall. Time slowed into something as sticky as my sweat.
Third, another language is a system of signifiers on which we often hang helpless.
We are able to notice that the symbolic is a structured meshwork which is usually firm
enough to hold us in our place or let us swing through it as if we were above the world,
outside language.
Immersion in another language is immersion in another world, and entry into it
can be like diving into something strange. A nice memory. After a long flight I arrived in
San José, Costa Rica, and hovered for a moment before the doors to the reception area of
the airport. Noise washed in as each passenger pushed past me and disappeared through
the doors. Once through the doors I struggled into a crowd, eventually spotting someone
holding up a newsletter I had sent over. We embraced as if I had been drowning and now
was saved. A bad memory. A year later I arrived in Mexico City, and when I struggled
through the airport I found no one there. I had no address or telephone number, and now I
was alone. I went to the information point and they sent a call out with my name.
Eventually a young woman arrived. She had been sent to meet me at the arrival gate, and
showed me the exercise book she had been holding up with my name written on the page
of graph paper in tiny letters. My place there wasn’t big enough for me to recognise
myself. It was a signifier alright, but not one I was able to catch hold of in such an
unfamiliar place.
A typical memory. I am sitting waiting to speak at a conference. I am introduced
to another person. I recognise my name in the words but nothing else. I am moved from
one place to another, metaphorically, symbolically, physically, by these networks of
words that I do not understand. But what I do understand, for a moment, is that I am a
subject who is represented by signifiers. I hear them flowing around me and doing things
to me and they are connected, linked in chains of meaning. And they represent me to
other signifiers, and only incidentally to myself, but the way they signify to me is
evidently different to the way they are being used by the others.
Fourth, another language evokes psychopathology in a peculiar way. We adopt a
certain psychopathological position when we relate to those we cannot understand in
another language, for our pretence to understand the other drives us into an obsessionalneurotic way of being. My partner is infuriated when I listen, nodding in comprehension,
to road directions given to me by a helpful passerby in Spanish. She knows that when she
asks me what they said I will on most occasions have to admit that I have no idea.
Obsessional neurosis tends to be associated with masculinity, so we are all provoked to
attempt to ‘master’ what we do not understand, and to refuse a culturally stereotypical
feminine position of dependency. We are reluctant to let ourselves be at the mercy of a
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symbolic system, for it threatens to make us or break us as men, whether we are men or
women. The man or woman who refuses to understand or play the language game is then
put in their place as a hysteric, positioned as a woman who may then resort to finding
other ways to speak, ways of speaking with their body perhaps. Mastery of language for
some – usually men - and feminisation of the silent for many.
Fifth and finally, another language is something that makes sense only
retroactively, after we know what it means. The struggle to piece together what is going
on in another language highlights an aspect of meaning that is usually invisible to us, that
sense is conferred on phrases retrospectively. A word we catch at a punctuation point, at
the end of a sentence perhaps, throws meaningless noise into relief, but at the very
moment that we grasp it, especially if that point is in the middle of a sentence, we are
pulled away from that anchorage as we try and fail to make it work for the words we hear
afterwards. Our understanding is always ‘afterwards’, and we might say ‘afterwords’.
Lacan’s re-reading and re-writing of psychoanalysis thus draws attention to the
way language works as a symbolic system which seems to provide a communicational
bridge to others but which renders us helpless and susceptible to forms of pathology,
positioning us retroactively and enabling us to make sense of things after the event. But
why does psychoanalysis make sense, and what is it about Lacanian descriptions of the
subject in language that seem so right when we face another language now, and when we
turn back to face our own language?
One of my children commented that he was glad he spoke English because it is
one of the easiest languages to learn. Most people in the world do move from one
language to another, and probably find their own languages easier than all the others, but
as a globalized dominant form of English crushes local forms of speech we who speak
English find other languages stranger and stranger and there is then the paradox that the
globalization of English actually makes communication more difficult. Phenomena like
mass tourism from the English-speaking world and more subtitled films in arthouse
cinemas give an illusion of communication at the very moment that they render
communication impossible. And these factors condition how words structure our own
position in relation to language. What we experience language to be is itself structured so
that our relation to language can be understood psychoanalytically. It is structured so that
Lacanian descriptions of symbolic space, mediated communication, signifiers
representing us to other signifiers, psychopathology in language and the retroactive nature
of sense-making now make sense.
Attempts to find an alternative to the colonial character of language which would
also be at the same time an alternative to learning all the other languages, have driven
English speakers to seek ‘universal languages’, like Esperanto. However, such universal
languages always reflect our assumptions about what language should be like and they
rest on the mistaken assumption that language is simply about the moving of meaning
from one person to another. Each attempt to define clearly what the meanings should be
has missed what actually happens when we speak. And speaking another language brings
us closer to the confusion that is the necessary stuff of what we call communication.
And the Lacanian notions that have been mobilised here to make sense of what
happens to us monoglots are themselves an expression of the globalization of English.
Even the Lacanian fascination with mathemes as elements which would ensure that
psychoanalysis is perfectly transmissible is yet another symptom of the fantasy that
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another way of speaking that would not subject us to another language would be possible.
Globalization – including the globalization of English - makes Lacanian discourse
possible, in the sense that globalization creates the conditions for psychoanalytic
reflections on language to strike us as right. In the process, the globalization of English
plays its own part in the globalization of psychoanalysis itself, and makes available a
psychoanalytic subjectivity to us when we speak its language.
LACANIAN NARRATIVE
The reflection in that vignette on the experience of learning another language, and upon
the way psychoanalytic forms of narrative came to organize my own subjectivity, focused
on one of the versions of psychoanalysis circulating in Western culture. The work of
Jacques Lacan has been particularly attractive to cultural theorists precisely because it
attends to the role of language in the formation of consciousness and the unconscious
rather than reducing the development of the personality to biologically wired-in stages.
Still better, Lacanian psychoanalysis is concerned with the cultural formation of fantasy
and of the illusion of narrative coherence and personal identity that is provoked by and
beset by fantasy (Žižek, 1997). It is then tempting to use Lacanian psychoanalysis as a key
to unlock patterns of culture and personal narrative, and to lose sight of the way that key
is itself formed as part of the very narrative shape it so neatly opens. Here we must take
care not to buy into this version of the truth about our psychology, even if it appears to be
a truth about the nature of our psychology as constructed in narrative and as fragmented
and indeterminate (Parker, 2000).
Psychoanalysis does not really ‘decode’ cultural artifacts at all, even when it helps
us to see something quite different in the images that surround us and draw us in as
readers and consumers (see for example Williamson, 1978). When we engage in a
psychoanalytic ‘decoding’ of a cultural phenomenon we are always already ‘recoding’ it.
Even when we are discovering something of the shape of psychoanalytic discourse and its
impact on our own experience, we are still having to write ourselves into it as we analyse
it, and that practice of writing also reproduces psychoanalytic theory as the key that has
unlocked our language. Some Lacanian analysts come close enough to the social
constructionist line in this paper to be able to recognize that naming the unconscious ‘is
an act which not only instantiates an element, but gives it consistency and engenders a
structure’ (Nasio, 1992, p. 48). This argument serves our purposes in so far as it draws
attention to the cultural formation of a structure, but it should not then draw us into that
structure so that we take it for granted. What we need to do, then, is to be able to address
the ways in which we learn that Lacanian psychoanalysis is true. The next little vignette
explores how narratives of learning invite us to become the kind of subjects that
Lacanians are so easily able to recognize.
LEARN AND ENJOY
What is the relationship between learning and enjoyment? A schoolroom at Crunchem
Hall in the film Matilda (1978) displays a sign warning ‘If you are having fun you are not
learning’. In contrast, one of the slogans of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in The
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is ‘Share and enjoy’ (Adams, 1977). Does that mean
5
we’ve got something to look forward to? Or is the place of enjoyment becoming more
complex as our subjective experience of pleasure at learning is drawn into the equation as
a necessary function of what it is to attain knowledge? Perhaps we are being recruited into
a kind of psychoanalytically-structured regime of truth in which we are subject to a
senseless super-egoic imperative to enjoy. I enjoy learning but I wonder if I am now
obeying a command to learn and then feel increasingly anxious that my students should
enjoy their work.
Education is changing fast, and it sometimes seems as if the transformation in our
relation to knowledge under capitalism is speeding up. This transformation is twofold.
First there is a bureaucratization of education institutions. This is proceeding apace under
‘New Labour’ in Britain in secondary education with the enforcement of Standard
Attainment Tests (SATs). Not only does this bureaucratization mean that as much energy
is put into assessment and record-keeping than into instruction, with an increased
administrative load on teachers, but the competition between schools that SATs-based
league tables produces is also reflected in the strategies that individual schools and school
students adopt. We have also noticed an instrumentalization of education on the part of
students in British higher education since the Thatcher years, in which, for example, they
choose modules that will lead to jobs as opposed to those that they might find intrinsically
interesting, enjoyable. Correct speech, the kind that will lead to accredited education
targets, is at issue here. Students and teachers have become increasingly aware of the
importance of correct speech, of patterning what we say about what we do and what we
think into an approved educational narrative.
The latest manifestation of this concern in Britain is the Teaching Quality
Assessment (TQA) in higher education where every movement of the student and teacher
must be captured, classified and represented on forms. The exercise effectively sabotages
the very process it is supposed to guarantee - partly because of the drain on time available
to talk to students and partly because questions and responses have to be distorted to fit
parameters that admit of easy comparison across different subject areas. The logical endpoint of this kind of assessment which reduces ‘quality’ to a numerical form lies in the
use of multiple choice assessments, things which are becoming more popular in UK
psychology at least and creeping up from first year courses into other years at an alarming
rate.
This first aspect of the transformation – a narrative of monitoring - contradicts the
second aspect, which is the narrative call for a greater degree of student-centred learning.
In primary and secondary education the rhetoric of devolved responsibility through the
‘local management of schools’ is of a piece with an imperative to self-government. At the
same time Britain’s National Curriculum gives a peculiar structure to the ‘law’ to which
this rhetoric of devolution of responsibility, this ‘correct speech’ must conform. And
again it does seem as if correct speech that follows the letter of the law is crucial here.
‘Innovative teaching and learning strategies’ in higher education, for instance, are put on
the agenda for the TQA in desperate attempts to give the visiting panels the impression
that a desire to learn is being summoned from the students themselves. The context committee burnout and over-documentation - militates against this, and self-directed
student activity becomes another arena for the cynicism that riddles much of our
experience of learning now. In one case in Manchester, for example, stressed staff refer to
such activity as ‘FOFO sessions’ (code for ‘Fuck Off and Find Out’) which give them a
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break from a heavy teaching and assessment load. This is hidden, coded, incorrect speech.
This production of official ‘correct’ speech and covert ‘incorrect’ speech would be
more comprehensible and manageable if it were linear and unitary. But it is not. It is not
linear, for every tilt toward ‘progress’ and improvement in this narrative is
countermanded by a hope that we might retrieve some ‘genuine’ forms of learning. At the
same time as there is a rhetoric of modernization and the ‘new’ in public life there is also
an attempt to return to something idealized as true education, a regression that would
work in such a way as to circumvent something nasty (as regression always does), in this
case to avoid the perils of rote learning. A few years ago the Greek Education Minister
tried to reform the education system by going back to basics with the catch-cry ‘Speak
like Plato, think like Plato’. A corresponding rhetorical move is evident in the anxieties of
those who complain about children being subjected to kinds of speech, forms of discourse
which they fear to be the diametric opposite of ancient Greek. Many then worry that we
must avoid the prospect that children might speak like the Teletubbies, think like the
Teletubbies.
The process of transformation is also not unitary. The contradiction between the
two aspects of the transformation (bureaucratic regulation and the call for student-centred
learning) strictly demarcates learning that must be tolerated in order to gain the right kind
of course credits from learning in a way that entails having fun. One of my students who
chose a psychoanalysis module - generally perceived as one of the useless courses described that choice as his ‘treat’, and as a place where he felt he was genuinely learning
something. He compared this to his experience in one of the ‘useful’ modules, on
psychological testing, where he felt as if he knew less at the end of the course than at the
beginning. Ok, this was gratifying, but it expresses something of the shape of the
problem. There is a feeling that something is lost when learning is not tied into
enjoyment. To conform to the letter of the law does not mean that we are engaging in
anything that is meaningful, perhaps the opposite. An episode of the British satirical
television programme The Day Today (BBC1, 1994) quizzed a member of the public
about whether they thought people should obey the letter of the law. When they agreed,
they were asked which one, which letter. In education it does sometimes feel as if facultymonitored and externally validated courses must be turned into something senseless to be
taken seriously by those who make their careers out of monitoring and validating what is
taught and learnt.
But we teachers and researchers in higher education are also entangled in this
super-egoic imperative of the law and regulation of speech and enjoyment as much as
those ‘other’ bureaucrats above us, and we relay the demand for enjoyment to our
students. One of the effects of this dialectically interrelated, mutually constitutive
separation into two different narratives is that our perception of our place in institutions
of learning is of contradictory transformations that cannot be pieced together. And so our
experience of our position is split.
Different forms of capitalist culture incite and require different forms of
psychoanalytic subjectivity. The latest mutation in culture - which some describe, I think
mistakenly, as ‘postmodern’ - does seem to be expressed in forms of learning governed
by ‘law’ organized around the super-ego as ‘speech’, so that we are subject to a series of
senseless demands. These demands to regulate and tabulate learning outcomes then
pervade our experience of learning itself. When Lacan argues that the law is reduced to a
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kind of ‘You must’, to a point where the speech that conveys it becomes senseless, he
anticipates something of the predicament that we find ourselves in as teachers. This
doesn’t mean that Lacan is ‘right’, and this isn’t the point, but he expresses something of
the relationship between knowledge and experience now. Lacan wasn’t ‘postmodern’
either, but in some sectors of culture he is relevant because Lacanian narrative is
embedded in them. As I went through US customs, a process that requires some degree of
close examination, I was subjected to the senseless super-egoic command at the end,
‘Enjoy’.
Think of education as induction into a system, a system of knowledge organized
in such a way that it seems logically rule-governed, and that is underpinned by a moral
imperative that we should attain knowledge. As we position our students within this kind
of structure, and grant them recognition as thoughtful committed participants, we also
convey a message about what learning is. A critical reflection on our experience of
education reveals that this metaphorical narrative of induction into the law and the
imperative to enjoy is not only a means to help us understand what is going on, but is
embedded in the very operation of our institutions. Psychoanalysis helps us understand
this story. But psychoanalytic modes of experience are also demanded by it. It means that
as we participate we also ‘learn’ something about ourselves as we make ourselves into the
kind of subjects who can make sense of what is going on. We might even learn to ‘enjoy’
it.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
The task in these examples has been to translate the experience of being in specific
cultural settings into a description that is conceptually woven into a psychoanalytic
vocabulary. But this is not because psychoanalysis is the template to reveal psychic
investments. If we treat it in that way we will get trapped once again in psychoanalysis as
a form of truth. This is the risk taken by Hollway and Jefferson (2000), for example. The
problems is that to treat psychoanalysis in that way – using Kleinian psychoanalytic
theory to tell us why people are ‘defended subjects’ - could be as bad as treating
psychology as a form of truth. Hollway and Jefferson’s innovative use of free associative
interviewing to elicit narratives draws attention to the importance of subjectivity in
research, but it also at the same time privileges psychoanalysis as a ‘meta-narrative’ rather
than viewing psychoanalysis as one powerful narrative in Western culture through which
subjects account to others. Their analysis ‘works’ because psychoanalysis is already
woven into the texture of culture, and as we translate it we need to untangle some of the
threads of experience that organize us as subjects psychoanalytically. This is something
that narrative approaches can help us to do, and that is something I have tried to do in my
two little vignettes. Psychoanalysis is textualised into life under capitalism, and a
reflexive re-writing of subjectivity reproduces psychoanalytic narrative.
The conceptual and methodological assumptions about culture and identity in this
paper are a little different from those in some recent formulations of narrative psychology.
Unlike Yates and Sclater (2000), for example, I do not simply use psychoanalytic ideas to
explain cultural processes. We need to take an additional reflexive step to look at how
those forms of explanation are themselves embedded in discourse and so in personal
narratives. Crossley (2000, p. 67) argues that personal narrative is ‘a special kind of story
8
that every one of us constructs to bring together different parts of ourselves into a
purposeful and convincing whole’. However, we need to ask how that striving for a
purposeful and convincing whole is organized, and how it is presented to us as a model of
how we should configure ourselves as ‘selves’. There is a risk of prescribing a certain
coherent kind of subjectivity rather than questioning how subjectivity is formed if we
claim that, like all narratives, ‘the personal narrative has a beginning, middle and end’
(Crossley, 2000, p. 67). Unlike Freeman (1993), for example, the re-writing of the self I
am exploring here is more of a critical de-construction of the way we have already been
written than a drawing together of personal history into a coherent narrative of the self.
The narrative turn in psychology opens up possibilities for working with
subjectivity rather than treating it as a nuisance or a luxury. Traditional ‘scientific’
psychology aims to screen out all subjective investments in research, and that is why
psychologists find reflexive engagement with those they study so nauseating. That is also
why, when alternative critical forms of psychology bring subjectivity into teaching and
writing this reflexive engagement is seen as their little treat that a lucky few may be
permitted to indulge. Now we need to draw upon reflexive ethnographic work from
outwith psychology to explore how we might evaluate narrative psychology as an entirely
different research practice. Criteria we use might include the substantive contribution to
our understanding of a phenomenon, aesthetic considerations, reflexivity woven into the
production of knowledge, the impact of the work, and the way in which the work conveys
an ‘embodied sense of lived experience’ (Richardson, 2000, p. 937). In this paper I have
tried to convey something about the possibilities of writing and re-writing ourselves and
something of the role of psychoanalytic narrative in drawing us into cultural phenomena.
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