Autobiography, Narrative, and the Freudian Concept of Life History
- Autobiography, Narrative, and the Freudian Concept of Life History
This article suggests a narrative reading of the Freudian conception of life history. Its point of departure is the recent discussion on the relationship between autobiography, narrative discourse, and the self. In this discussion a new interpretive approach to psychological, philosophical, and psychiatric issues of life history has emerged, highlighting the cultural (particularly, narrative and discursive) construction of what we take to be our “lives.” This approach will be outlined, specifically in its variant as “psychoanalytic narratology.”
Against this background the question is raised regarding the narrative models of human development and life history that underlie Freud’s thought and, in particular, his case histories. It is argued that these models are embedded in an “applied” narrative mode in the Freudian master narrations. The proposed narratological reading distinguishes seven organizing narrative structures of Freudian psychoanalysis which draw, first, on patterns of nineteenth-century folk psychology, second, on the literary genre of “Bildungsroman,” third, on what is called “the archaic pattern,” fourth, on Freud’s idea of the “family romance,” fifth, on the “Darwinian narrative,” sixth, on the “Newtonian narrative,” and seventh, on the “modernist story.” In transforming these structures into “metapsychology,” psychoanalysis, it is argued, has created a widely convincing set of narrative models of human life that appear to be applicable to a great variety of contexts regarded by common sense as natural. What makes psychoanalysis such a powerful system of codes for the life-construction even in quite different Western traditions is that it is also a cultural system that constitutes what appears natural in the life of a person, wherever this life is lived and told.
psychoanalysis, culture, discourse, time
Autobiography and Life History: A New Look
In this paper I shall be concerned with two ways to explore an individual’s life history. Both are focused on autobiographies and life stories—one from the point of view of its narrative and discursive modes of construction, the other from the point of view of psychoanalysis. I shall begin by briefly presenting the first perspective (I), and then, from this vantage point, approaching Freudian psychoanalysis (II). In outlining the narrative structures which underlie Freud’s conception of human life (III and IV) and their implicit models of time (V), I shall relate two theoretical and empirical fields which, so far, have not had much to do with each other.
Recently, the relationship between autobiography, narrative, and identity has become the subject of a new theoretical and empirical interest. Drawing on research in several disciplines, a literature [End Page 175] has emerged that has highlighted the specific cultural nature of these constructions of life by studying the narrative and discursive fabric of the stories (or fragments of them) which people tell about themselves (see endnote). Of course, neither the study of biography, autobiography, or other self-narratives, nor the idea of basing a psychology or even a philosophical theory upon the lifespan of human beings is new. It is the combination of this view with several new ideas that has radically modified the traditional model of autobiography as the story of a “lived life” which is told retrospectively, more or less chronologically, and along teleological lines.
These new ideas are linked to the emergence of a new semiotic, discursive, and cultural paradigm in the human sciences, that too has cast a new light on our view of the function, content, form, and agent of the autobiographical process. What happens in this process, as Bruner (1993) has argued, is life-construction through text-construction. To understand a life, we must turn to its text; more specifically, we must explore how this kind of text is “written,” so to speak. “To look at a life,” Bruner writes, “as if it were independent of the autobiographical text that constructs it is as futile a quest for reality as the physicist’s search for a Nature that is independent of the theories that lead him to measure one rather than another phenomenon” (55).
The idea of the autobiographical process as construction of a text marks a sharp contrast to all ideas that present autobiography as an entity comparable to...
