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Narrative Truth and Historical Truth:
Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis
By Donald P. Spence
New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1982. 320 pp. $19.95.

Here is a book that many ministers and theologians would normally never see-but should. Donald P. Spence has written a learned, insightful, and even controversial account of the process of interpretation, whether of biblical texts, personal lives, or works of art. The fact that it speaks most directly to his own profession of psychoanalysis does not limit its usefulness to those of us engaged in the same interpretative enterprise from other (though related) vantage points, namely ministry and theological reflection.

The book is a critique of the traditional Freudian "archaeological" paradigm in psychoanalysis, in which a patient's hidden past history and its meaning is reconstructed on the basis of free association and the analyst's interpretations, much in the manner of an archaeologist recovering a lost culture on the basis of fragments and clues found in the digging. (A strikingly similar working metaphor applies to biblical hermeneutics as currently practiced, particularly in relation to the exegetical and preaching tasks.)

Spence challenges that understanding sharply, drawing from such diverse sources as the history of art and the American novel as well as psychoanalytic case histories. He argues that the interpretative process is not so much one of reconstruction as it is of creative construction itself, leading to the formulation of "narrative truth" as opposed to the unearthing of "historical truth." A dialectical interplay and tension between the two "truths" sets the boundaries for interpretation. Thus the interpretation we do of the "texts" we work with is a far more active process, and far more involving of ourselves, than we often think. Realizing that, and knowing how the hermeneutical machinery works in our hands, can make us better interpreters and better stewards of the issues and the people given, by whatever means, into our care.

One immediate point of contact, for example, between psychoanalytic and theological concerns has to do with the kind of trust we place on the interpretative process and on ourselves as interpreters. On the theological side, we have traditionally exhorted the interpreter-preacher, exegete, or even well-informed biblical reader-to suspend his or her own agenda and to be open to the meaning of the text without interference from whatever it is that we are thinking or intending at the moment. No one ever said it would be easy, but we have adopted it more or less uniformly as a norm, particularly when it comes to such hermeneutical activities as preparing a text for preaching. The psycho-analytic aim has been much the same, the analyst being admonished to bracket apart his or her personal concerns from the presentations of the therapeutic hour, or at least to take account of the ways those concerns

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might possibly confuse or distort the present picture. Our goal in all this has been the recovery of "the historical truth" about our "texts"-personal, biblical, literary, or artistic.

Spence's thesis confronts what may be regarded as that basic defensiveness and proposes something far more honest and radical, which may be more familiar in some ways to the theologian than to the analyst: this blanking out of the interpreter's presence simply cannot be done, no matter which side of the coucb--or the pulpit-we are on. Far from crippling interpretation, the inescapable presence of the interpreter's life is one of the main things that makes it work at all. The trick is learning to know the difference between what we find and what we construct. Given that premise, we are free to probe more deeply into the hermeneutical process, to discover that the very act of thinking is a multi-layered affair, and to realize that memory itself, far from being the pristine receptivity we have often thought it was, requires our ongoing participation in the creation of what makes meaning.

To the purist that is not always a pleasant discovery, which most likely explains why this book has received mixed reviews in orthodox psychoanalytic circles. To the working interpreter, however, it offers both insight and relief. It gives us permission to take ourselves seriously as active agents in the whole process, as well as to understand how our agency operates in the very pragmatic business of helping people understand how they make sense of their lives.

"Narrative" has become something of a shibboleth in theological conversation of recent years, not always, however, with benefit of firm theoretical foundation. Spence makes a significant contribution to that deficit by offering some clearly thought-through connections to the experiential domain we have always intended (but not always articulated) when we talk about the concept of narrative. In other words, the sharp thinking of this study makes a nice whetstone for dull talk about a popular subject.

J. Randall Nichols
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey