Psychoanalytic Narratives: 

Writing the Self into Contemporary Cultural Phenomena

By Ian Parker, Ph.D.

 

The different contexts in which people are thinking of  themselves as critical psychologists is really interesting,  and what they make of what we say also teaching us a lot.

 

My talk will develop some of the themes that I discuss in my book Psychoanalytic culture, but it will also reflect on how we can include ourselves as researchers and writers in the material we study. My argument is that psychoanalysis should be taken seriously by critical psychologists, and by those who are interested in being critical of psychology, not because it is universally true but because it functions as a powerful way of talking about ourselves, as a discourse, in western culture. The way it functions as discourse, which structures much advertising, films and contemporary novels, means that we cannot easily refuse to talk about ourselves as having 'defenses', 'unconscious desire'.

In my talk I will introduce these ideas briefly and then offer two little vignettes about the way psychoanalytic discourses structures two different social phenomena. These examples should make accessible my argument and help us reflect on the power that psychoanalytic ideas exert over us.

Abstract of Paper

 

In this paper 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 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.

 

Key words: 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. 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 a way of writing the researcher into the account. I have been very cautious, perhaps too cautious, but this is reaching toward a method that tries to connect internal space and the social realm and which 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). 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 has also permitted a further reflection on our work as a practice embedded in forms of culture (e.g., Squire, 2000), and this 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 it would be a very limited step forward that simply replaced the manipulation of 'subjects' in experiments with close observation of them in kinds of ethnography. Qualitative research outside psychology 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).

How might we employ psychoanalytic writing in this kind of way? There are two aspects of the task we need to attend to. One concerns our reading and writing of psychoanalytic theory. The other concerns our work in it as we read and write it. This would mean that what we read and write is:

1.  not only 'about' psychoanalysis, but works within psychoanalytic reasoning, inhabiting it and turning it back 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 by embedding psychoanalysis 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. That is, a way of reading cultural forms that have a psychological effect, a way of reading that reads them as narrative, and that treats the methodological device of psychoanalysis itself as narrative. This requires a different mode of subjective engagement and address to the reader. This 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 and, to use the jargon of deconstructive therapy, it externalizes it rather than treating it as something inside me (e.g., Parker, 1999).

The first vignette reflects on language, and here my writing about language aims 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. (FIRST VIGNETTE)

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 (Zizek, 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 (cf. 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 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 structures of learning invite us to become the kind of subjects that Lacanians are then so easily able to recognize.  (SECOND VIGNETTE)

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 simply 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 (e.g., Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). And to treat it in that way would be as bad as treating psychology as a form of truth, which is something that narrative approaches help us to side-step. Rather, the 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. 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. It means that psychoanalytic ideas cannot simply be used to explain cultural processes (Yates and Sclater, 2000). 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. It does often seem to be the case in contemporary Western culture that personal narrative is 'a special kind of story that every one of us constructs to bring together different parts of ourselves into a purposeful and convincing whole' (Crossley, 2000, p. 67). 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). 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 (cf. Freeman, 1993).

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, and when alternative critical forms of psychology bring subjectivity into the teaching and writing this reflexive engagement is seen as their little treat which a lucky few may be permitted to indulge.

Now we need to draw upon reflexive ethnographic work from out with 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.

References

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