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illness is not merely characteristic of the neurosis. It also possesses great
theoretical significance." What we are led at this juncture to conclude is
that Freud is implying that a coherent story is in some manner con·
nected with mental health (at the very least with the absence of hys–
teria), and this in tum implies assumptions of the broadest and deepest
kind about both the nature of coherence and the form and structure of
human life. On this reading, human life is, {deally, a connected and
coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with
everything (or as close to everything as is practically possible) accounted
for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely illness amounts
at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate
narrative account of oneself.
Freud then describes in technical detail the various types and orders
of narrative insufficiency that he commonly finds; they range from
disingenuousness, both conscious and unconscious, to amnesias and
paramnesias of several kinds and various other means of severing con–
nections and altering chronologies. In addition, he maintains, this dis–
composed memory applies with particular force and virulence to "the
history of the illness" for which the patient has come for treatment. In
the course of a successful treatmen t, this incoherence, incompleteness,
and fragmentariness are progressively transmuted, as facts, events, and
memories are brought forward into the forefront of the patient's mind.
And he adds as a conclusion that these two aims "are coincident" -–
they are reached simultaneously and by the same path. Some of the
consequences that can be derived from these extraordinary observations
are as follows. The history of any patient's illness is itself only a substory
(or a subplot), although it is at the same time a vital part of a larger
structure. Furthermore, in the course of psychoanalytic treatment, noth–
ing less than "reality" itself is made, constructed, or reconstructed. A
complete story -- "intelligible, consistent, and unbroken" -- is the
theoretical, created end story.
It
is a story, or a fiction, not only because
it has a narrative structure but also because the narrative account has
been rendered in language, in conscious speech, and no longer exists in
the deformed language of symptoms, the untranslated speech of the
body. At the end -- at the successful end -- one has come into
possession of one's own story. It is a final act of self-appropriation, the
appropriation by oneself of one's own history. This is in part so because
one's own story is in so large a measure a phenomenon of language, as
psychoanalysis is in tum a demonstration of the degree to which lan–
guage can go in the reading of all our experience. What we end with,
then, is a fictional construction which is at the same time satisfactory to
us in the form of the truth, and as the form of the truth.
