Chapter 3 The Story-Listener and Self-Deception
3.2 Similarities within Transference, Transferential Relation, and Storytelling 55
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themselves in the stories as well as the plot structure created by themselves. When a storyteller or a story-writer creates stories as the conduit for his own self-consolation and as the representation for his self-deception, stories may be treated by the listeners as ways of evasion as well. With interpretive and constructive potential, stories build up a transferential space for the listeners to associate their life with stories and to reconstruct their past with the assistance of imaginative power embedded in stories.
3.2 Similarities within Transference, Transferential Relation, and Storytelling
Storytelling is similar to the psychoanalytical transference: the narrative dynamics between a teller and a listener is similar to the transference relation between an analysand and an analyst. While the former is the one who speaks out his repressed unconscious, the latter listens to the content and analyzes the significance of the content. Both relations get involved with the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the stories. The parallels between the transference and storytelling stimulate Peter Brooks to appropriate the Freudian concept of transference to elucidate the narrative dynamics as the transferential relation and scrutinize the potential power of change in storytelling that influences the teller and the listener to alter their perspectives on reality.
Due to such similarities within the transference, the transferential relations, and storytelling, some traits discussed in the transference and the transferential relations, such as “compulsion of repetition” and “countertransference” can be applied to examining storytelling and the narrative dynamics in The Pillowman. In addition, Peter Brooks’ theory of transferential condition can also be utilized to explore the interpretative and transformative dynamics among Katurian, Michal, Tupolski, and Ariel, which explicates their self-deception produced during storytelling.
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3.2.1 The Reciprocal Narrative Relation in Transference
Storytelling is a reciprocal and active process between teller/writer and listener/reader. Hubert Hermans and Els Hermans-Jansen explicate this reciprocity:
“[w]hen there is a story, there is always someone who tells the story to someone else.
It is the reciprocity between teller and listener that makes storytelling a highly dynamic interactional phenomenon” (9). The interaction between the teller and the listener involves a process of transmission. Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the storyteller sheds light on the transmission of memory between the teller and the listener in storytelling; it is an “assimilation” of the memory of the two (149). Peter Brooks extends the psychoanalytic conception of transference to describe this dynamic interaction. He defines the reciprocal relation between the teller and the listener as the “transferential relation” (50).15
The conception of the transferential relation proposed by Brooks is originated by transference raised by Sigmund Freud. Transference is a dynamic interaction between the patient and the therapist because the former transfers his emotions and feelings caused by the repressed and the unconscious past onto the latter as displacement and projection. Edward Erwin explains transference in two shades of denotation: for one thing, it means that individuals transfer their past experiences to the present and they respond to the current situation based on the past experiences; in other words, it is
“displacement from the past into the present” (567). For another, this displacement and the retrieval of the past are actualized in the clinical relation between the analyst and the analysand. Based on the discoveries of Freud, Sandor Ferenczi contends transferences are “the re-impressions, and reproductions of the emotions and
15 The references of Peter Brooks cited in this chapter all come from his book Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford:Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1994).
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phantasies that have to be awakened and brought into consciousness during the progress of the analysis, and are characterized by the replacement of a former person by the physician” (15). According to Freud, transference awakens, arouses, and makes conscious the repressed pasts which have become “new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and phantasies” (qtd. in Klein 236). Since it is a “new edition,” this revived past does not belong to the past anymore. Instead, it is the past “applying to the person of the physician at the present moment” (qtd. in Klein 236).
Transference is a struggle and negotiation between the therapist and patient for pulling out the unconscious so as to reproduce it in the treatment. In this course, the work of transference plays tug-of-war with the resistance of the patient. In his “The Dynamics of Transference,” Freud elucidates the relation between transference and resistance in light of sexual desire. During the process of evoking and awakening the repressed and the unconscious past originated from libido, the wrestling with the self-perception of this craving for sexuality from the patient gives rise to resistance against the work of transference. If the work of transference overcomes the mechanism of resistance, it will be positive transference, which causes affectionate feelings, such as sympathy, friendship, and trust that help to better our lives. In Freud’s view, these affectionate emotions can be traced back to erotic desires which
“have developed from purely sexual desire through a softening of their sexual aim”
(Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference” 32). However, if the work of transference fails to overcome the mechanism of resistance, it becomes negative transference that engenders emotions of hostility and ambivalence. When the transference is confined to the negative one, “there ceases to be any possibility of influence or cure” (Freud,
“The Dynamics of Transference” 34).
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The dynamic transaction between transference and resistance arouses the patient to remember his past with repetition of the past. It causes “compulsion to repeat which now replaces the impulsion (sic) to remember” (Freud, “Remembering” 151).
In Freudian assumption, during the process of transference, because the resistance of the patient interferes with the exposure of the repressed and the forgotten past, the past is not provoked by merely uttering, but by repeating and acting it out;
compulsion of enactment from the patient is his way of remembering. Transference is thus a medium for the patient to remember, to enact and to repeat his repressed unconscious. The strong disavowal and resistance to the revival of the past stimulate the patient to employ acting out and repetition to replace his remembering. Freud thus states that “[t]he greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering” (“Remembering” 151).16
In the transference situation, when the analyst is likely to displace and project his emotions onto the patient, countertransference also arises at this moment.
Countertransference refers to the analyst’s transferential response to the patient’s transference; it represents “the analyst’s reactions to the patient’s productions and actions” (Erwin 571). Laplanche and Pontalis explain countertransference as: “The whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand—especially to the analysand’s own transference” (92). The analyst is not a passive object who inertly receives the projection of emotion from the patient. Because he owns agency to respond to transference from the patient, he displaces and projects his emotions
16 Following Freud’s proposition of transference situation between the analyst and the analysand, later discussions about transference focus on a variety of possibilities connected with clinical relations between the analyst and the analysand. Elizabeth Zetsel assumes that transference serves the function of mitigating the threat of superego for the analysand, and helping the analysand to develop his ego.
Herman Nunberg extends it to explicate the object correlation between the internally unreal object of the analysand (the unconscious) and the externally real object (the analyst). Heinrich Racker also proposes that transference is a psychological means to dealing with an internal object and making the internal conscious by the assistance of the external object (the analyst). In the viewpoint of Melanie Klein, transference is the deflection and revision of “total situations” from the patient, including his past, emotions, defenses, and object-relations (243).
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onto the patient as well. When the analyst displaces and projects his emotions onto the patient, countertransference steps into the transference situation. Traditionally countertransference and transference are considered as two different and separate concepts, but they are gradually regarded as intertwined and blurred. They are like two sides of one coin, ubiquitous and inevitable in the clinical treatment.
Freud in his “The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy” proposes countertransference as one of the “innovations in technique” in psychoanalysis (Freud, “Future” 19). For Freud, the better and advanced process of transference between the analysand and the analyst is made up of two parts: one is “what the physician infers and tells the patient,” while the other is “the patient’s work of assimilation, of ‘working through what he hears’” (Freud, “Future” 17). The process of transference therefore becomes mutual acts of relationship between the analysand and the analyst. The analyst interprets what the analysand talks about and helps the analysand to deal with the association between the past and the present. The response from the analysand at the same time elicits the repressed and the forgotten personal experiences of the analyst. As a result, the analyst may also generate transferential emotions towards the patient, and this is countertransference, “which arises in the physician as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings” (Freud,
“Future” 19). Simply put, countertransference is the reversal of roles in the transference relations. The analyst becomes the one who displaces and projects his emotions and repressed desire onto the analysand.
Countertransference from the analyst may engender empathy towards the analysand. Heinrich Racker specifies such countertransference as “concordant identification” (134). It is based on “introjection and projection,” on “recognition of what belongs to another as one’s own (‘this part of you is I’),” and on “the equation of
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what is one’s own with what belongs to another (‘this part of me is you’)” (134). The concordant identification is realized by the identification of the analyst who
“identif[ies] each part of his personality with the corresponding psychological part in the patient” (134). It is actually positive countertransference and empathy, as what Racker puts it: “it should be borne in mind that the disposition to empathy—that is, to concordant identification—springs largely from the sublimed positive countertransference, which likewise relates empathy with countertransference in the wider sense” (136). In this way, countertransference causes the analyst to feel empathetic toward the analysand.
Transference and countertransference are an active and dialectical interaction between the analyst and the analysand, or the patient and the therapist. Transference is not a one-way analytic treatment for the patient. Rather, it is a mutual impact operated on the analysand and the analyst; the analyst is not an unaffected and mandatory listener who receives the messages from the analysand regarding his repressed unconscious, either through narrating or through acting out. In the new model of transference, the position of the analyst is also valued as a unique individual, “with his own theory of how therapy works, his own idiosyncrasies, his own conflicts, his own past, and his own strength and weakness” (Goldstein and Goldberg 39). While the analyst catalyzes the analysand to remember and provoke his unspeakable past, the analysand, to some extent, also becomes as stimuli to elicit the analyst’s unutterable past. In this way, the positions of the analysand and the analyst are blurred; the boundary between transference and countertransference also become indistinct and nebulous. The relationship between the analysand and the analyst is thus very dynamic and dialectical.
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3.2.2 Transferential Relation and Transferential Space in Storytelling
Peter Brooks appropriates the dialectical interaction in transference to interpret the narrative relation between the storyteller and the story-listener and between the text and the reader. The dialectics between the analysand and the analyst can be associated with the dynamics between the storyteller and the story-listener as well as that between the text and the reader. Brooks asserts that most narrative relations between tellers and listeners speak of the “transferential condition” between tellers and listeners, which involves “their anxiety concerning their transmissibility,” “their need to be heard,” and “their desire to become the story of the listener as much as of the teller” (50). According to Brooks, transference bears analogies to “the nature of a narrative text between narrator and narratee—and eventually between authorship and readership” (53). Brooks proposes this parallel on account of the process of the construction of meanings in storytelling.
Storytelling and transference bear the similarities of the production, construction, and interpretation of narratives. Both bring into play “the dynamic interaction of the teller and the listener of and to stories, the dialogic relation of narrative production and interpretation” (Brooks 50). In psychoanalytical transference, the analysand is the storyteller who tells (or acts out) his past stories, and the analyst is the listener who reacts to the story. During the course, due to the mechanism of resistance and renunciation of reproducing the past, the analysand may tell or unconsciously repeat fragmental or inconsistent stories. The analyst has to interpret, reconstruct, and piece together meanings of the stories with incomplete narrations and repetition in order to comprehend the analysand’s repressed past and life experiences, and in turn interpret the association of the past with the present. The analyst has to treat words and symbolic acts of the analysand as actual and active forces of the present, but he
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simultaneously “attempt[s] to translate them back into the terms of the past” (Brooks 53).
Likewise, storytelling is also a process of reconstruction and interpretation. The meanings of the narrative are partly dependant on the reconstruction and interpretation of the story-listener or the text-reader. Brooks states that, in the dynamic relation of storytelling, the listener or the reader substantiates his “conviction of the truth of the construction” of the story and provides the story with “narrative truth” by piecing the whole picture and interpreting the meanings for the story (59).
Brooks borrows psychoanalytical transference to render the conviction from the story-listener/the reader with the construction of narratives either in the form of oral tales or of written texts. In such transferential relation, the analysand (the storyteller) must
“possess the true stor[ies]” that need to be construed, but some stories that are restored and retrieved may not actually be remembered or retold by the analysand (Brooks 58). Instead, it is the analyst (the narratee) who constructs the stories and renders meanings to the stories, which he uses to interpret and associate with the repressed conscious of the analysand. The construction of the analyst is
“unsubstantiated, unverifiable, yet carries conviction” so it is believed that the construction “must be right” (Brooks 59).
In the narrative dynamics, the construction and association of the stories by the listener/the reader thus becomes the narrative truth which makes him believe that the stories occur and develop in the way he pieces it together. Such deep belief in the narrative from the listener grants power to convince people that “things must have happened in this way” because the construction and interpretation of the stories will become the only explanation for the stories that “make sense of things” (Brooks 59).
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Such interpretively analytical constructions from the analyst may lead to delusions of the analysand (Brooks 60). Brooks appropriates Freud’s discovery of transference dynamics to explain that the conviction of narrative truth may turn out to be “the experience of fantasy” (60). Such experience of fancy influences the analysand to construct and treat his own past based on the transferential interaction with the analyst. But such construction is not necessarily true to his real past; it is delusional. Brooks renders the constructions from the analyst and the analysand to be dialogical and inter-influential so that they are equivalent to “two versions of narrative that test themselves [the two versions of one another] against one another”
and they work together to make a complete and satisfying narrative (60). Dino Felluga concludes that Brooks thus explores “the power of narrative to possess our imagination [imagination from people]” that leads us to “narrative closure” (Felluga N. pag.). The listener or the reader possesses such force of imagination that helps him to interpret and construct the story to give the story an explanatory ending.
Peter Brooks spatializes such dynamic transferential relation between the storyteller/text and the story-listener/reader. In the transferential relation, there is some interpretive margin of construction and imagination. Brooks defines this margin as the “transferential space.” According to Brooks, the transferential space is “the place of fictions, of reproductions, of reprints, of repetitions,” through which interpretation and construction are effected (68). It is an “artificial space for the reworking of the past in symbolic form” (Brooks 53). This transferential space allows fillings of imagination and fantasy. With this transferential space, the teller narrates his stories, elicits his repressed memory, or fills his forgotten memory with illusions.
It is a space “of conversation in which repressed or forgotten experiences are expressed or made public” because in that space, the past of the teller will be exposed
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through storytelling (Vilaseca 183). During the dissemination, stories and memories from the storyteller are transmitted and transferred onto the listener who supplements and reconstructs them with the listener’s experiences or imagination to make sense of what he hears and comprehend it in his own ways. The stories and memories are thus under reformations and are granted new meanings. Alison Landsberg proposes the transferential space as a site in which “people are invited to enter experiential relationships with events through which they themselves did not live” (66), because it affects the teller and the listener to enter into the realm of reconstruction, which is composed by the interconnected life experiences and imaginations from the two parties. Stories of others thus become a kind of imagination to supplement the real life of each other. The transferential space is a leeway where imagination is allowed to organize and clarify stories as a completion in the transferential situation. Both the teller and the listener hover around the space mixed of reality and imagination.
To conclude, the theory of Peter Brooks about the transferential relation and the transferential space aims at tackling the potential power of change of narratives. The dynamics engendered during the storytelling has an impact on both the storyteller and the story-listener, changing their way of seeing the reality. Brooks believes that, like transference, storytelling may not affect the two parties to change their past, but to
“rewrite its [the reality’s] present course, and prepare an altered future” (68). Through the transferential dynamics, the listener and the textual reader will “find himself modified by the work of interpretation and construction” (72).
3.3 Self-Deception in Transferential Relations in The Pillowman
Brooks raises the concept of transferential relation to overturn the traditional formalist narratology which regards narratives merely as a “referential function” (72).
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In this chapter, I borrow the idea of transference and the conception of transferential relation to scrutinize the narrative dynamics within the four characters in The
In this chapter, I borrow the idea of transference and the conception of transferential relation to scrutinize the narrative dynamics within the four characters in The