Who Needs Narrative?

Arguing for the psychological uses of narrative, Bill Benzon at The Valve distinguishes the "autobiographical self" (i.e. identity over time) from the "core self" (i.e. one's integrated psycho-physiological state at any given time). He claims that the "core self," influenced as it may be by intense situational and physical factors (he uses hunger and sexual desire as examples), not to mention its transient nature, threatens to disrupt the autobiographical self. He suggests that narrative (he specifically mentions "play-acting" and "storytelling") usefully provides an overarching frame within which to understand and evaluate our dispositions and behaviors over time.

The account leaves out a lot of course (for instance, it would seem that temperament straddles both kinds of self). And his case seems a bit extreme--as if even a starving man would look back on his life as having been little more than an ultimately unsuccessful quest for food--but there may be something to it. After all, someone in a deep depression may view much of his past "through a glass darkly" in a way that lightens considerably when the episode relents. And obviously the two selves affect each other reciprocally and continuously.

Staying with Benzon's schema, it would seem that psychological distress occurs in two varieties. Unhappiness is a malady of the autobiographical self, a dismayed sense that one's story has somehow gone awry through vicisitudes of sensibility or circumstance. One seeks in a therapist a kind of narrative catalyst that will open up unimagined possibilities, including the often profound possibility of actually being listened to and perhaps even understood. Dysfunction of the core self manifests as symptoms that may actively impede functioning. There is considerable overlap between the two, but arguably we resort to psychotropic medication inasmuch as symptoms appear to be beyond the power of narrative to reframe. But nothing is more frustrating than to try to treat unhappiness with meds or to tackle narrative-resistant symptoms with more narrative. Diagnostic confusions and controversies arise from the difficulty of distinguishing symptoms from unhappiness.

It occurs to me that like certain other phenomena such as religion and even music, narrative broadly considered (that is, interest in all stories whether contained in books, film, gossip, or hearsay) is hard to explain because it is very widespread but not truly universal. Some faculties, such as hunger and thirst, are obviously ubiquitous because their absence is not compatible with life. Others, such as basic senses or sexuality, are not imperative for individual life but are so typical of the species that their absence is uncontroversially deemed pathological.

Inasmuch as existence is necessarily temporal, some interest in narrative is presupposed, even if only speculation as to where the next meal will come from. But sophisticated narrative--that is, at least at the level of communal folk tales--has, like religion, been found to exist in virtually every human society. And yet just as there is a reliable minority of individuals who are irreligious, there are of course people here and there who are relatively free of the narrative bug, who may be more invested in other domains of experience (facts, ideas, bodily experience, etc.). If religion and narrative truly are central to (individual and species) human identity, then how is it that even a (non-pathological) small minority more or less escape their purview? Perhaps diversity itself is such a powerful evolutionary engine that it constantly throws out alternatives to the prevailing cultural trajectory, suggesting of course that those faculties we view as indispensable are actually contingent.

Odds and Ends

I've been busy looking over page proofs for an epically wrangled-over article ("Evolution, Human Enhancement, and the Narrative Self," available by email request) for Literature and Medicine. Blog posting takes two minutes; academic print publishing can take two years (maybe if a blog is wine by the box, the academic journal is something more sophisticated). But there is something to the knowledge that one's work is occupying physical space in libraries (I take my pleasures where I can get them).

At any rate, this blog reflects my liking for quotes, which are like grains of sand that get lodged in my oyster of a brain until, one hopes, they are transmuted into something else. So as I was looking over that manuscript I came across a few quotes that, to switch metaphors, serve as the survey stakes for what I was trying to get across. To reverse metaphors, I should allow the possibility that these great quotes are themselves pearls that I merely manage to grind back down into my sandy prose.

But philosophy has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else. On the other hand, religion is an immense power which has the strongest emotions of human beings at its service. (Freud, "The Question of a Weltanschauung").

Perhaps the tragedy of classical psychoanalysis was its inability to accept that what most human beings most need is not insight, but something else entirely (which is only partially supplied by religion). Freud hoped that the treatment would change the allegedly neurotic need. But would we still recognize Homo sapiens without this need?

This is Socrates' legacy, and it is precisely this challenge that Freud takes up: to figure out a form of conversation in which one can succeed in genuinely taking oneself into account. (Jonathan Lear, Freud).

By bringing psychology into philosophy, Freud was trying to make the latter more philosophical. But his psychology wasn't yet psychological enough.

If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted) I should say, "I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you, but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the law must keep its promises. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted by Steven Pinker).

This is a spot-on summary of the necessary compatibility of free will and determinism. All is determined, but human society (and specific persons) can only function by presupposing that individuals can modify their behavior.

Yes, we were natural for eons before we were cultural--before we were human, even--but so what? We are cultural now. (Robert Scholes, quoted by Harold Fromm).

In a way this mind-bender, conjoined with evolutionary psychology, motivated my whole paper. How much does our escalating knowledge of our own contingent human nature grant us real freedom to alter our own individual and species identity?

One of the good things psychotherapy can do, like the arts, is show us the limits of what science can do for our welfare. The scientific method alone is never going to be enough, especially when we are working out how to live and who we can be. (Adam Phillips).

Amen.