On the seductions of psychoanalytic story-telling: Narcissism and the problems of narrative

In this paper, I argue for a particular reading of narcissism that challenges the privileging of narrative as a sense-making device, with important consequences for an evaluation of the story paradigm in psychotherapeutic work. I lean on the psychoanalytic mechanisms of Nachträglichkeit and trauma to trouble dominant therapeutic logics that support the primacy of the (narcissistically centered) narrative “I.” Rather than endorse the story of “me, me, me” that popular readings of narcissism invoke, I explore the possibility that, in psychoanalysis, narcissism’s modes destabilize the I, making the narrator constitutionally unreliable, and her accounts of all subject-object distinctions uncertain and constantly shifting.