plot snakes and the dynamics of narrative experience / allen tilley

plot snakes and the dynamics of narrative experience / allen tilley

Google Books.

Secondary high memetic plot lines abound in literature of all forms and types, however, and this century has seen the birth of a major extraliterary genre of high mimetic narrative. Freudian analysis. In psychoanalysis, the patient and analyst collaborate in producing a retrospective story of the patient’s life. The notion that psychoanalysis is a kind of narration has intrigued many people inside and outside the psychoanalytic community. Donald Spence, a psychoanalyst, provides a good bibliography of psychoanalytic literature on the topic in his Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (1982).

Spence is concerned that the status of psychoanalysis as narrative brings its validity into question. Any narrative told of external events involves the following factors: (1) the event; (2) the perception of the event; (3) the memory of the event; (4) internal verbalisation of the memory (encoding); (5) transmission of the coded memory; and (6) reception of the story (decoding). At every step lies an opportunity for distortion. We cannot know the event directly and simply but only through the mediation of our sensory abilities, which represent the event trough patterns (perhaps neural patterns in our brains) not found in the event itself. Our memories are endlessly creative. In psychoanalysis, encoding is conditioned by expectations and assumptions that, as Spence says, are never made entirely explicit. In any case, all encoding consists of symbol and meaning systems with their own distorting constraints. Narratisation, as I am attempting to specify here and as Spence is aware, carries ts own set of templates, projections, and filters. (pp 51-52)