Embodiment and Narrative
Making Sense: Narrative and Embodiment
This paper will explore the dialectical tension between the narrative unconscious and notions of embodiment, two frameworks that together offer insight into how identity is shaped and reshaped over time. Roger Frie’s (2012) paper on the narrative unconscious expounds on the interconnectedness between culture, history, and memory through the lens of coherent narrative elaboration. Frie defines the narrative unconscious as “the unconscious dimension of culture and history in human experience” (p. 330). This concept highlights how our most intimate perceptions of personal identity are woven into cultural and historical narratives, even when we remain unaware of them. In parallel, Robin Chalfin’s (2021) notion of embodiment speaks to how meaning is not just created through narrative but is lived and felt through the body, often beyond the limits of language. These two social phenomena—narrative and embodiment—both shape who we are at the core of the human developmental experience, revealing how the past is carried within the bodily present in ways that either support or fragment our narratives of selfhood.
Psychoanalysis began in the study of conversion disorder symptoms, which Freud first wrote about at the end of the 19th century. Conversion symptoms are somatic expressions of what Dan Siegel (2017) might call information, (i.e., 'energy in formation’) that cannot be contained within the patients' personal or cultural narratives. One could say that certain psychosomatic and relational symptoms are 'energy without formation,' they are unformulated experiences within the body. This is how the compulsion to repeat works: the bodily manifestations of unconscious relational patterning implicitly influence interpersonal exchanges through verbal and nonverbal means. The repetitions of these habitual uses of body and language are what character structure itself is made of. Chalfin refers to these aspects of embodiment and narrative identity as 'matter and meaning' (p. 32). Her paper explores the impossibility of putting the experience of gendered embodiment and personal identity fully into language. She uses the vocabulary of existential philosophy and psychotherapy as means of forming or constructing the self, but she also pays heed to the fact that the full essence of a person's subjectivity can never be completely grasped in language. This dynamic interplay between meaning and matter becomes a dialectic through which a person can grasp a 'felt sense' of oneself (Gendlin, 2003, as cited in Chalfin, 2021).
To explore the themes of the narrative unconscious and notions of embodiment, I will offer up my own experience in a personal reflection. For much of my life I had no clear sense of my family’s history, which left me feeling disconnected from a deeper sense of who I was. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood this absence manifested in somatic symptoms—things like chronic pain and difficulty breathing. My aim in this paper is to explore how the absence of narrative—a state I will call being-without-narrative—creates a sense of embodied alienation that dislocates the subjective experience of oneself and the world-at-large. Through psychotherapy and narrative construction, we can put words to what was once unspoken and thus unconsciously embodied, transforming emotional and physical suffering into something that, while at times intolerably painful, does ‘make sense.’ This paper will explore how working with both narrative and the body allows for new understandings of identity, opening space for growth and healing in ways that embrace complexity, contradiction, and nuance.
Growing up, my family didn’t tell many stories from previous generations. I didn’t learn much at all about my heritage. I felt like a person without a cultural narrative. I knew that I was white, and vaguely had the idea that my ancestry came from Europe. People who weren’t Irish would tell me that my surname sounds Irish, but Irish folks would be confused. When I became more aware of the loss of my family story—how we got to what felt like a random area in rural Ohio from eastern Poland—I felt for the first time the real loss of self that had always been there. Frie (2012) begins to describe this type of narrative-less pain when he says: “The difficulty is that culture and history are often assumed to be ‘out there,’ as though in some way existing in a separate register from personal experience. This viewpoint is reflected in the fact that culture is often identified with difference, so that the majority group in our society tend to think of itself as cultureless. It also promotes a lack of reflection on the sociocultural and historical embeddedness of all values, ideals, and norms” (p. 331). I wanted to know something about myself that I wasn’t discovering in individual psychotherapy. I wanted to know my roots. I had a sense that whatever it was that I would find in exploring my ancestral roots would be painful. I knew this on an embodied level, as I now believe that it manifested in somatization symptomology. After a lot of work in psychotherapy that made me more able to talk with my parents without bitterness or grievance, I finally found the words to begin to ask more questions. I rediscovered my curiosity about where we came from and what unconscious transgenerational forces may have shaped me. As Frie reminds us, “Our histories are interwoven with narratives that precede us and that exist outside of memory precisely because they exceed what we can know of them. The fact that they are not known, in a conscious, rational sense, does not limit their relevance or impact on our lives” (2012, p. 331). I knew that my paternal grandfather died by suicide. But I knew nothing about the conditions or context of his death or life. Because his death was not put within a narrative context in my own mind and family story, I was left with what I can only describe as a kind of 'nothingness' when I tried to think of my family history. It was an inner fragmentation that I suffered from but didn't consciously know existed, and so I could not yet desire to know it. It became an absence of narrative, which manifested as chronic bodily pain. It was neck, upper back, and hip tensions and aching. I sought both western and eastern methods of healing these pains, in none of which did I find an answer. I now believe I came up short through the medical routes because these kinds of emotional pains need to be held within a community context. ‘I’ could not hold it, but perhaps ‘we’ could.
It wasn't until I started psychotherapy that I realized that my somatic symptoms were emotional in nature. There was a period of catharsis in which I cried continuously in therapy, and I began to release my chronic tension and gradually put words to previously unspoken thoughts and feelings. I started to create my narrative in places where it hadn’t existed, and to stretch for further narrative coherence in other places. Eventually I found enough ego strength to begin the project of asking questions and doing my own ancestry research. I discovered that my grandfather's father, Paul, died while living in an ‘insane asylum’ for the last seven years of his life. I researched my ancestry on the internet, and I discovered Paul’s death certificate, which was initially difficult to find because our family changed our last name. His cause of death was listed as 'manic exhaustion.’ He had several very young children at home, my paternal grandfather being the youngest. The story goes that when Paul died, his wife—my great grandmother—abandoned the children to be raised by the oldest daughter, who was 18 years old at the time. Allegedly, this oldest daughter answered the door to child welfare services with a shotgun and the children were left to be raised by her.
This is the most complete narrative that I have been able to glean so far from what remains of the truth. But there are elements of this narrative that do not add up. The most obvious being: why wouldn’t child protective services intervene? While I don’t blindly accept this story at face value, much of it does make emotional and intuitive sense to me. In knowing this probable mix of truth and hyperbole, I have been able to see some of the more psychotic parts of my family clearly. In seeing these truths, I feel free. This opened a door within my mind that allowed for something more than the nameless dread that I had experienced. Before having this information within my mind, I could not know why I felt so bad. This experience helped me see there were powerful parts of my life-narrative that preceded my own birth. Mark Freeman (2002, as cited in Frie 2012) says the narrative unconscious can form a “disruptive counternarrative that may infuse one’s history with new meaning and complexity” (p. 194). This knowledge helped me to disidentify with parts of my personal narrative, and to simultaneously take more responsibility for it. I felt less burdened by the past and more ownership of my present.
While it is true that one can never exist as a solitary individual outside of cultural narrative, how do we account for the ‘dislocated’ feelings of alienation? In contrast to Heidegger’s (1962) being-in-the-world, I posit my original idea which I call being-without-narrative. This is a kind of phenomenology of suffering that occurs in an absence of ‘situatedness’ (Frie, 2012) and results in feelings of ‘dislocatedness’. This is an experience that I have been able to link to the severe breathing difficulties that I had as a child. My main breathing symptom was that I felt like I could not ‘catch’ my breath. I do not have space in this paper to fully expand on how I came to link my childhood breathing difficulties with my paternal grandfather’s story, and I still ask myself how is it that I came to know these events are linked. Even in the act of writing this paper, I realized that the word ‘catch’ contains affective significance for my childhood in relation to my father’s incapacity to ever ‘play catch’ with me due to his chronic back pain and depressive symptoms in my youth. Additionally, I can say that something like an idea of ‘embodied time’ is another element of this epistemological inquiry. My intuitive sense is that there must be something of a transgenerational Nachträglichkeit or après-coup, to use the original Freudian (1895) and Lacanian (1973) terms respectively. The phenomenon these terms describe is a sort of ‘deferred action’ in which the past and present bleed together. In the context of this current study, I understand these somatic symptoms as having been, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, outside of ‘human time’. Frie, in referencing Ricoeur (2004, as cited in Frie 2012), says that historical time becomes human time “to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (p. 52). Frie then considers the emotional effect on a person without a narrative grounded in ‘human time.’ He posits that “Memory in the present can be of something absent, namely, the actual history of trauma” (p. 332). This ‘memory of something absent’ is the emotional pain that results from false or absent narrativity. And what must happen when I have a story about myself that is incorrect in the way that it does not fully account for the suffering that I feel? The answer would seem to be that more of history, both personal and cultural, must be unearthed by daring to not only remember, but also to speculate about the past that eludes or predates one’s accessible memory. As Eva Hoffman (2004) puts it when she reflects on her experience of gathering the narratives of the second generation of Holocaust victims, “The paradoxes of indirect knowledge haunt many of us who came after” (p. 25). To fill in the gaps in one’s historical memory is akin to Freud’s concept of constructions in analysis. Psychoanalytic interpretation and construction are practices of hermeneutic speculation. Interpretation, construction, and hermeneutics create a narrative about who one is, which contains previously uncontainable affect within the narrative. What contains mental pain is embodied narrative. In discovering the transgenerational narrative of my father’s side of the family, I felt that the historical trauma was finally able to be situated in its correct ‘human time’ within my own body-mind. Before I knew the story of the trauma, I blamed by father for his shortcomings. Having historical insight into why he might have been chronically depressed—that he was abandoned by his father, and his father and mother before him—gave me a sense of temporal continuity and allowed me to grieve for these painful losses. Through this grief I finally felt freedom, and some of my ghosts became ancestors (Loewald, 1960).
In writing about my personal exploration, I sought to expand Chalfin’s use of the notion of queer embodiment to go outside of strictly sexual or gender-based uses of the term embodiment. I wanted to open it up to a broader use that I believe the pathos of her argument supports, one that includes the concept of identity as far as it can stretch. I examined how, in the words of Frie (2012), “In narrative, we give voice not only to our own experience, but also to our cultural history”. In discovering the roots of my inherited family trauma, I have been able to build a coherent narrative about familial and cultural forces that have shaped my responses to present life situations and relationships. For Brunner (1990), this narrative that I have created for myself out of the shadows of untold family history is understandable to “the degree to which [I am] able to specify the structure and coherence of the larger contexts in which specific meanings are created and transmitted” (p. 64). My personal narrative only makes sense when it is nested within my cultural and familial narratives.
While this process of narrative construction proved incredibly helpful for my personal healing, this process is not without a certain danger. As powerful as narratives are, there is the risk that they become fixed and rigid. It would be a mistake for me to assume that I discovered something essential about myself in this discovery. When a narrative about one’s life is formed, what is happening is not a discovery of ‘truth,’ but of ‘possible truth.’ Frie addresses this aspect of narrativity when he says, “It is not simply a process of making the narrative unconscious conscious, but rather of articulating possible gestalts of one’s life, or gestalts of possible lives” (p. 338). In putting words to the stories of what may have happened in my heritage, I am articulating a possible gestalt of my grandfather’s life, which freed the narrative fixity that creates psychosomatic symptoms. Narrative deconstruction and reformation are ongoing processes. As Gadamer (1996) claims, “We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished” (p. 301).
The exploration of narrative unconscious and embodiment illuminates the intricate relationship between our inherited histories and lived experiences. One powerful intersection between the body and unconscious narrative is in the phenomena of somatization. By understanding how unspoken cultural and familial narratives inhabit the body, we gain insight into the formation of identity and the manifestation of psychosomatic symptoms. My personal reflection demonstrates how the absence of narrative can lead to a profound sense of alienation and dislocation from oneself. Through the construction of new narratives in psychotherapy, it becomes possible to transform emotional and physical suffering into something coherent and meaningful. Yet, this process is not without its complexities. As powerful as narratives can be, there is always a risk of rigidity, where stories become fixed and limiting. It’s crucial to approach narrative construction not as a search for an ultimate truth, but as an ongoing, evolving process that embraces ambiguity and multiple possibilities. In doing so, we can hold space for growth and healing that integrates both the known and the unknown, allowing for a fuller sense of self that accommodates the complexity of human developmental experience.
References
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chalfin, R. (2021). The entanglement of being: Sexuality inside and outside the binary. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 22(4), 283 295.
Freud, S. (1950). Project for a scientific psychology. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 283-397). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1895)
Frie, R. (2012). On culture, history, and memory. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 48(3), 329-343.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1996). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.; 2nd rev. ed.). Continuum.
Gendlin, E. T. (2003). Beyond postmodernism: From concepts through experiencing. In: Understanding Experience: Psychology and Post Modernism, ed. R. Frie. New York: Routledge, pp. 100–115.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927)
Hoffman, E. (2004). Memory & meaning. Random House.
Lacan, J. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1973)
Loewald, H. W. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 16–33.
Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Siegel, D. (2017, November 8). How our Relationships Shape Us by Dr. Dan Siegel. YouTube.