Editors' Preface: Narrative, Empathy, Proximity

"The feelings that concern psychoanalysis are always feelings enmeshed in stories."

Nancy Chodorow, The Powers of Feelings

In one inflection, narrative is the medium we exist in; the air we breathe; it is how the mind makes sense of things, interprets stimuli. In this formulation, we must become conscious of the ways in which we are claimed by and make claims according to narratives; we must be careful not to be swept along in a story of someone else's making. In a darker variation, narrative is a mechanism for interpolating us into the workings of domination, and oppression. Narrative is on the side of power and control; our stories are already plotted. In yet another account of narrative, however, stories are not limiting or controlling; they enable exploration and release; they are expressions and acts of movement, possibility, redefinition, intervention, and intersubjectivity. In this issue of Literature and Medicine, narrative is on the side of the angels. Narrative, like art itself, is consolation; but its power to heal arises from its power to connect us.

In this issue we are getting down to fundamentals, primary causes, asking again, with the benefit of all we have learned, the big questions: Why do stories matter? How is empathy bound up with narrative? What is a workable, ethical, legitimate, or bearable relation to suffering, that of others and our own? And to probe ever deeper into these questions we bring aboard a new partner, or perhaps an old if sometimes silent one, with whom we share a preoccupation with stories. In psychoanalysis, the talking cure (or in Geoffrey Hartman's phrase, the "story cure"), telling a story and listening to a story are the most serious of human enterprises; and as psychiatrist Neil Scheurich observes in "Reading, Listening, and Other Beleaguered Practices in General Psychiatry," both literature and psychotherapy often find themselves "struggling to convey the worth of those experiences to unconvinced general audiences." He observes further, "Both literature and psychotherapy often entail attention to unpleasant, even horrible aspects of experience in the hope that suffering, when properly contained and considered, may widen one's vision."

Indeed, if reading and engagement with stories broaden our capacity to feel for others, psychoanalysis has painstakingly explored the complex operations of empathy and identification, theories of which have been forged in the smithy of the analyst's office. We are proud to publish "Narrating, Attending, and Empathizing," by Roy Schafer, whose foundational work on the role of narrative in psychoanalysis and on empathy has influenced work in both fields, psychoanalysis and literary analysis. Schafer here explores how "paying therapeutic attention is a narrative action," and how story is central in achieving the mutuality and relatedness that are therapeutically transformative. "[A]t the height of the empathic moment, the subjective boundaries of self and other are assumed to be blurred," as the therapist is engaged in "recontextualization" of the patient, or "taking into account as much of the patient's experienced life-historical background as has been worked out thus far," that is, his or her story, where mutuality and relatedness can be achieved. And our hope, in this issue, is to deepen the mutuality and relatedness of the narratives of psychoanalysis and literature and medicine, in bringing them into proximity. Beneficiaries of the first conference to bring narrative medicine and psychoanalysis together, held in February 2004 at the University of Florida at Gainesville, we have taken a step beyond chiasmus to triangulation: literature, medicine, and psychoanalysis, presenting a cluster of papers from that conference, here elegantly introduced by Peter L. Rudnytsky, and followed by reflections by Geoffrey Hartman.

Stories contextualize and decontextualize, or "recontextualize" in Schafer's term. They bring us closer to one another and also give us the perspective of distance. Proximity and distance emerge as persistent themes in this issue. To feel our own feelings in our telling, or to feel with another's stories, the right distance or the right nearness must be achieved. Catharsis is achieved as an act of narrative distancing, as Lisa J. Schnell shows in "Learning How to Tell." For Schnell, the first story...