Telling stories

Patients need to tell their stories. One of our primary tasks as analysts is to help patients tell their stories and own them. The freedom of mind to think, to feel, and to know are dependent on the ongoing capacity for storytelling. The analyst's stance plays a major role in the development of the analysand's storytelling capacities.     

Love stories

This article presents a view of love as a story. The basic idea is that through the interaction of our personal attributes with the environment, the latter of which we in part create, we develop stories about love that we then seek to fulfill in our lives. Various potential partners fit these stories to greater and lesser degrees, and we are more likely to be attracted to and then to become intimate with partners who better fulfill the roles we have created in our stories. Each story has two complementary roles, and people tend to be satisfied in relationships when they can match persons to ideal stories and roles within those stones. A tentative taxonomy of some kinds of stories is presented, and the characteristics of the stones are described. The view is also related to contemporary theories of love, and it is argued that the current view is complementary with these theories, in that it answers different questions about the nature of love than do the other theories.     

Ghost stories

This essay reflects on the exclusions and invisibilities that haunt academic subjectivities, spaces, and research practices. The exclusion criteria that delimit both scholars and scholarship are not natural or fair; they are the expressions of classed, raced, gendered, and ableist ideals, that privilege separation, order, and certainty. That which is marked as other – the remainder, which must not or cannot be admitted – is not fully excluded, but lurks at or below the waterline of legibility, disrupting academic bodies and departments with its persistent, often affective traces. Rather than trying to explain something that is primarily characterized by its inexplicability, the author brings readers into her department, to try to show them the ghosts that she has (not quite) seen, in order to appeal for more humane, inclusive, ghost-friendly ways of being and working in the academy.     

Summarizing scrambled stories

Subjects read stories 1,400 words long and wrote 60- to 80-word summaries of these stores. Reading time was either unrestricted or limited, and the stories were either presented in natural order or with their paragraphs scrambled. Reading times were longer for the scrambled stories, but the same kind of summaries were produced whether stories were presented in natural or scrambled order. When a well-structured story was used, judges were unable to distinguish the two types of summaries and rated the adequacy of summaries based upon the scrambled version about as high as that of summaries based upon normal stories. For a less well-structured story, judges could differentiate between the summaries from natural and scrambled stories. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the story schema which permits subjects to comprehend scrambled stories by reorganizing them.     

“鬼”事两则

《科学与无神论》编辑部:我第一次阅读贵刊之时,就想把我自己经历的两回"鬼事"告诉你们,但我是农民,文化低,缺知识,不知我的"鬼事"讲给人听,有无利益?想了好几年没有定论,我是体残、多病、年老、风烛残年的人,何时死去无法预料,我亲身经历的两回"鬼事"不说出来,总好像有件事没有做完似的,今天决定告诉你们,如果没有用就丢纸篓里,假如有些用,请整理发表,为了对事实的负责,若有必要可以写出讲述人我的姓名。     

Coming out stories framed as faith narratives, or stories of spiritual growth

The tension between religion and sexuality is particularly pronounced for gay and lesbian people who are often “caught in the middle” between a constitutional sexual orientation and a religious body that rejects it. This paper demonstrates how gay men can be helped in trying to integrate these deeply human and intrinsic parts of themselves, using a developmental approach first articulated by Robert Kegan. It argues that such development is often reflected later in theological language: in this case, in these men's coming out narratives, which are often framed as stories of spiritual growth.     

Vicarious life stories: Examining relations to personal life stories and well-being

We examined relationships between vicarious life stories for mothers and distant others, personal life stories, and well-being. Participants described chapters in their mothers’ and personal life stories, self-rated chapters on emotional tone and meaning, and completed well-being measures. In Studies 3 and 4, participants described chapters for distant others. In Study 4, mothers’ personal life stories were collected. In Studies 2–4, chapters were coded for redemption, agency, and communion. Qualities of vicarious and personal life stories were positively related, except for ex-boy/girlfriends (Study 4). Vicarious life stories were less positive and were less consistently related to well-being than personal life stories. Vicarious life stories for mothers were positively related to both participants’ personal life stories and mothers’ personal life stories.     

Spinning the stories of our lives

The way people talk about past events can affect the way they remember them (Tversky & Marsh, 2000). The current research explores how people naturally talk about events from their own lives. Participants recorded what, when, and how they told others about events from their lives. In general, participants talked about recent emotional events, and told them primarily to peers in order to convey facts and/or to entertain. Not all distorted retellings were regarded as ‘inaccurate.’ Participants labeled 61% of their retellings as distorted (containing exaggerations, omissions, minimizations, or additions) but only 42% of their retellings as inaccurate. Social context shaped the stories people told: they changed stories for different audiences; they exaggerated to entertain and simplified to inform. People construct stories as they retrieve and use memories in a social context. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fifteen minute stories about training

This panel presentation at the Journal's conference in St Petersburg responded to the conference theme of 'Ancestors in Personal, Professional and Social History' by relating it to the experience of training and being trained on the IAAP 'router' programme in Russia. The two organizers of the programme (JW and CC) have worked in Russia for over 12 years, bringing analysts from Britain to Moscow and St Petersburg on a 'shuttle' basis as supervisors and personal analysts. A few months after handing over the router programme in December 2010 to the Russian colleagues they had trained, they invited four analysts, three Russian and one Belarusian, to tell a short personal story about their training, linking it to the theme of 'the Ancestors'. The resulting four stories are very different but complement each other, using imagery to illustrate issues concerning both value and ambivalence. JW and CC jointly wrote their story about the programme in response to the four stories, reflecting on some of their themes and from them, giving consideration to the flexibility and limits of such a model of cross-cultural training. Themes in the stories included the possibility of mutual adaptation to another culture without losing tradition and identity; moving on from doctrinaire Soviet attitudes in education to embrace 'not knowing'; both organizers and routers learning from mistakes and from joint experience without guilt or shame; the need to protect reflective space amidst the constraints of time and geography. All Russian and UK contributors could finally acknowledge their shared luck to find themselves in the right place at the right time to respond to the collective revival of psychoanalytic practice in Russia.