Who Holds the Pen?

Is Psychoanalysis Just a Narrative Therapy with Better Writers

"the explanation of spirits as unconscious complexes is the worst form of reductionism, explaining the unknown by the even more unknown."

- Bruno Latour

Okay yes, psychoanalysis is making a comeback. I’ve seen it happening for a while now. You can see it pretty much everywhere these days. In cultural discourse, in the podcasts, in the think pieces, in therapy rooms where therapist’s are reaching back toward Freud, toward Lacan, toward object relations. The CBT hand-outs are done. The evidence-based practice movement produced competent technicians and bored clients. Therapists and their people (notice how I didn’t say patient..) want depth. They want a story and practice that feels equal to the strangeness of being alive. So, many are returning to psychoanalysis or psychodynamic practice. We shouldn’t be surprised. Therapy has always been better at looking backward then toward the future.

I get it. I too have been drawn to psychoanalytic thinkers, even Lacan when I was feeling ambitious. For a long time, I couldn’t quite explain the attraction, because I was skeptical of the foundational claims. The unconscious as hydraulic system. The Oedipal thing. The drive theory. None of it held up for me clinically or philosophically. But I kept paying attention to what was going on in the psychoanalytic world. It’s been recently that I figured out why. It wasn’t what psychoanalysis said it was doing. It was what it was actually doing. The philosophical range and depth. The willingness to sit with ambiguity and contradiction. The quality of the world-building. Psychoanalytic thinkers write well because their project, whatever they believe about it, is fundamentally a narrative one.

In 1930, Sigmund Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize. Not a science award. A literature award. He wasn’t happy about it. I think it’s one of the more telling things that ever happened to psychoanalysis. Because this is what I’ve come to believe: psychoanalysis is a narrative therapy. It always was. It has just refused to admit it.

Let’s start with the case studies. Dora, Wolf Man, Rat Man. I mean come on; these are novellas. They have characters, dramatic tension, interpretive revelation, a narrator with a very strong point of view. Freud was constructing a world where he storied himself as the discoverer. The unconscious isn’t a place he found. It’s a place he built. Brilliantly written, coherent, aesthetically compelling. But all a construction.

What came after tracks the same way. Jacques Lacan produced work so dense and referential it functions as experimental literature. Carl Jung built a full mythological cosmology populated with archetypes. Donald Winnicott gave us transitional space, and I challenge anyone to tell me that isn’t a poet’s formulation. Melanie Klein had internal objects at war with each other inside the infant psyche. These are not scientists describing a territory. These are writers building worlds.

The giveaway is what happens when you compare the gifted analysts to the mediocre ones. The gifted ones (see Jamieson Webster and Adam Phillips) produce more elaborate, more persuasive, more internally coherent interpretive universes. Which is exactly what you’d expect from writers. A beautiful interpretation doesn’t become more accurate because it’s beautiful. It becomes more convincing. Those are not the same thing.

Narrative therapy, the tradition I work from, understood that therapy is a narrative practice and took that seriously instead of hiding it. Michael White and David Epston didn’t pretend that storytelling is some sort of depth psychology. They named that the person is the author of their own life. The therapist is a curious, decentered witness who helps them find alternative stories, thicker descriptions, counter-narratives to the dominant plot. The therapist isn’t interpretive or prescriptive. They ask questions that open space.

The problem with psychoanalytic world-building isn’t that it’s world-building. It’s who holds the pen. In classical psychoanalytic practice, the analyst knows what your dream means. In contemporary psychodynamic practice they have access to your interiority that you don’t have. The interpretive authority belongs to the expert, and the client is essentially a character in someone else’s story about them. That’s a significant power arrangement performed as analytical insight.

Narrative therapy looked at the same fundamental insight, that human meaning-making is storied, that our suffering and our resilience both live inside narratives, and asked what happens when we give the pen back. When the person becomes the author rather than the character. When the therapist’s job is to hold space for that authorship rather than to perform a more impressive one.

So, when people are circling back to psychoanalysis or psychodynamic practice right now, I understand it. They’re hungry for an imagined depth, for something with enough imaginative spirit to hold the complexity of a human life. That wanting is legitimate. The question is whether we can meet them without handing interpretive authority back to the clinician. Whether we can have the literary seriousness without the power differential.

Even though Freud tried otherwise, therapy has always been a cultural practice, not a medical one. The unconscious, the self, the inner child, the authentic core waiting to be found, these are cultural constructions, products of particular times and places and power arrangements. Some are more useful than others. Some are more honest about being constructions. That understanding and the honesty about it matters. It determines whether the person in front of you gets to be the author of their own becoming or a supporting character in someone else’s very well-written theory.

Freud’s Goethe Prize judges were right. They just didn’t know how right.

Peace.

The process of writing this essay was human writer first and human editor last. I used generative AI for ideation, research, images, and spellchecking. Pass judgement accordingly.

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If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.

October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.

I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.

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Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
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