Traces of Oneself and Healing
7.1 Experiencing and Narrating
We have repeatedly stressed how psychotherapy is a word-based therapy: it takes place through language. The therapeutic act takes shape through words: it aims to restore the patient’s capacity to take charge of his experience by renewing the sense and movement of life which have been restricted by the disorder. We have seen how the therapeutic journey of transformation, which takes a symptom as its starting point, is guided by a method which first disentangles from the symptom the under- lying experience that supports it and then subjects this to interpretation. For a patient, engaging with a problematic experience—be it a symptom or an unappro- priated narrative—means opening up to the search for sense and hence allowing oneself to be challenged by the experience in question, so as to bring back to life a multiplicity of horizons concealed by the disorder. These are the horizons which formal indication enables the patient to bring to manifestation, so as to retrace their trajectories down to their original contexts through their co-enactment with the therapist and to fully appropriate the experiential dimension in question, renewing the sense of what has been significant for his own world.
The guiding thread of this process is clearly language, through which living experience is articulated and phonemically expressed, in the form of narrative accounts. The verbal expression of experience through a narrative makes the mean- ingful contexts concretely experienced by the narrator more or less present in the therapeutic conversation, according to the actual unfolding of the events and the style of the patient’s factual experience. Following first Husserl’s reflections (Husserl 2006, First Investigation §26, Sixth Investigation §5) and then Heidegger’s ones on occasional expressions, we have emphasized this indicative aspect of asser- tion as a crucial point in the therapeutic conversation, insofar as it leads the listener toward the speaker’s meaning. Hence, the objectivity of the narrative explication, co-conducted over the course of the therapeutic conversation, is not imposed by an a priori order but rather emerges within the framework of those actual contexts to which it refers.
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When I describe my relationship with my wife and the events that shaped it, this account has nothing to do with the explication of the same theme which may be provided, for instance, by an object relations psychologist, a psychoanalyst, or a cognitivist therapist. Each narrative explication unfolds according to prevalent ten- dencies and motivations, which for each person will vary depending on the circum- stances—as well as, more generally, over the course of the individual’s life—and which provide the guidelines and the direction of the narrative, so to speak. As previously emphasized, for the phenomenological therapist, the horizons of tenden- cies and motivations that punctuate and distinguish the different periods of a per- son’s life—in a way that varies from individual to individual—also represent points of reference on the basis of which to newly articulate and retrace the series of mean- ingful contexts in the patient’s personal story. In other words, in his narrative, the patient articulates and relates the meaningful contents he experienced in actual life situations on the basis of those guiding ideas which determine the development of his story. Narrating an experience is different from living an experience. It is evident that the context within which the narrative takes shape is not the same as that in which the experience itself was actualized. To quote MacIntyre, “Stories are lived before they are told” (1984, p. 212)—even though taking notice of one’s own expe- riencing certainly does not amount to getting out of factical life.
The narrating of experience therefore represents a change with respect to the actual unfolding of experience—insofar as it is attuned in a different way to the current flow of events—and lends it an overall configuration which lived experience lacks. In an important passage from one of the densest texts from his early years, Heidegger writes with regard to the act of taking notice of experience and of its relation to factical expe- riencing: “What is decisive (i.e. in relation to taking notice) is that life, instead of advancing into tendencies of expectation and building life, gives form to the lived life from out of itself, stabilizing the meaning of the context of expectation and taking it as an explicit tendency” (GA 58 1992, p. 119). In other words, while human life spon- taneously unfolds in particular situations according to given motivations and tenden- cies, in narratives, it becomes stabilized, in turn stabilizing the contexts of expectation.
Hence, taking notice is an explicating modification of factical experiencing.
In the light of this perspective, we can understand Ricoeur’s emphasis on the narrative status of events (1992), whereby events are distinguished from mere occurrences, in contrast with the perspective adopted by causal explicatory models.
An event, then, will either carry a story forward, if it fits within this stable context without altering it, or mark a break, if it undermines the expectations created by the previous course of events.
In a narrative what is experienced is characterized as a well-defined whole with environmental boundaries, usually a beginning and sometimes an end. We might say that each narrative has a title, e.g., my holidays in Egypt last year, my relation- ship with my wife, my experience of working for an auditing firm, etc. The narrative explication, articulated according to the meaningful directions provided by living experience, lends unity to the meaningful contexts that have been concretely expe- rienced, shaping one’s lived experience and establishing one’s expectations. In such a way, each narrative modifies the mode of access to lived experience, because the
7 Traces of Oneself and Healing
particular meaningful frames according to which ipseity manifests itself are ori- ented and hence stabilized by a guiding context of expectation.
This unifying power of narrative integration and the difference in terms of attunement between living experience and narratives emerge in a particularly clear way in that experience which culminates with the phenomenon of catharsis in Athenian tragedy. In his Poetics, Aristotle uses the term catharsis to describe the experience of the spectator, who feels pity and fear in a different way from the protagonists of a tragedy. As Michele Alessandrelli (2015) writes in a valuable study on the topic:
“The moment the spectator sees protagonists on stage exclusively adhering to one meaning and losing themselves or tearing one another apart, he grasps that there are actually two or more possible meanings. The spectator is not hostage to the unilateral meaning which blinds the hero because he receives it from the μῦθος (i.e. from the plot of the story) in an enriched and integrated form. The μῦθος places this meaning within a wider context, in which it is possible to assimilate and bear it” (p. 17).1
In concrete experience, life is instead completely absorbed by a stream of events that follow upon and slip into one another, within a context of constant anticipation which is ceaselessly produced from one situation to the next and which determines the directions for its own development. Ipseity becomes such and attains manifestation together with the meaningfulness of the world, blurring the distinction between expe- riencing and what is experienced. The expression of factical life in a particular situa- tion includes meaningfulness, for it encompasses the latter within itself and in doing so lends it form—and this form is an implicit sense-giving. The expression of life—
coinciding with the way in which tendencies and motivations are actualized in a given situation with respect to the meaningful things one encounters—is therefore a trace.
What we have, then, are traces of oneself that are impressed upon life and which the narrative attempts to preserve by interpreting their meaning and orienting their vitality (Arciero 2006). Each trace thus points to a meaningful context and a signifi- cance that is enacted in the narrative. From this perspective, it becomes clear that a narrative can bring experience to manifestation by disclosing it yet also conceal it, becoming a source of illusion.2
A tension thus emerges between the way in which life generates form (the significance of an experience) in relation to the content it encounters and its linguistic expression: living meaning is verbally expressed—and hence articulated according to dimensions unknown to actual experience—as it becomes removed from life. While, on the one hand, the stabilization of meaning in a narrative lends a more or less enduring form to the heterogeneous multiplicity of tendencies and motives through which life expresses itself in relation to the meaningfulness nourishing it, on the other hand, it distances life from itself. And it is this distance which nourishes tragic catharsis.
1 What we mean by mythos is “the composition of facts,” which Ricoeur quite rightly interprets as the connection between facts (p. 59 vol 1) and which together with the mimesis praxeos—the imitation of action—constitutes the cornerstone of tragedy.
2 We have previously mentioned how a certain way of telling one’s story to oneself may itself be the source of a pathology.
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