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An Essay on Narrative, Reality, and Imagination

Article  in  Psychoanalytic Inquiry · October 2019

DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2019.1659025

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PSYCHOANALYTIC INQUIRY
https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2019.1659025

An Essay on Narrative, Reality, and Imagination

R. Curtis Bristol, MD

ABSTRACT
Narrative is a verbal account, a story of related events which can be factual,
fictional or both. Life experience and imagination are as essential to narra-
tive as narrative is to mankind. The phylogenic perspective of literature
suggests an inborn capacity for empathy, intelligence and inventiveness,
whereas the ontological example is variable. Western knowledge, politics
and ethics have evolved from their narrative of Greek myth, epic and
drama, the few medieval writers, singularly by the Elizabethan theater,
importantly the Arthurian legend and romance stories, English and
Russian novels, and uniquely the American short story. This heritage pro-
gressively demarcated such life themes as the hero, maiden and adversary;
love, hate and indifference; loyalty, deception and betrayal; desire, achieve-
ment and loss. These characterizations of self and other remain relevant to
the contemporary novel, cinema/TV, and theater, as well as the news,
commentary, and real life. Conversely, postmodern assumptions challenge
that individual subjectivity to determines what is real, valid or authentic,
consequently the relativism of traditional, institutional and historical pre-
cedents of the truth. Further, the computer, gaming, smart device, and
artificial intelligence have changed the content and function of customary
narrative. Nonetheless, narrative – real and imagined, ancient and new –
retains the meaning of a story about connected events which variously
transcends the boundaries of difference.

Whatever theory of mind, certainly from a psychoanalytic perspective and the evidence of everyday, it is
reasonable to postulate that narrative is a central organizer of lived experience (Lichtenberg, Lachmann,
& Fosshage, 2017). However, the assertion presents a dynamic unity balanced between two very different
sources. The first is the collective narrative of others that is an “organizer” of the knowledge, values and
beliefs which shape one’s education, religion and other matters of importance when growing up. The
other is the autonomous, private yet simultaneous narrative of self. This interplay of self and other is
replete in Oedipus where Sophocles 5th BC characters and chorus sort through the varying views of
personal history and destiny, honing the nuanced meanings of belief, fantasy, heresay and fact from their
varied lived experiences. The Oedipus myth of Thebes and Sophocles’ Athenian tragedy come together in
Aristotle’s Poetics, a fundamental contribution to what is meant today by the concept narrative. This is
a remarkable longevity for a word that stands for so much.
“Narrative” is defined as verbal account, a story told or written about connected events that are
factual and demonstrable, or fictional and imagined (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971). A news
account descriptively connects actual events, whereas creative literature imagines them. In fiction,
real events may also be represented and creatively used, for example to symbolize the meaning of the
related events. It seems obvious, but the distinction of fact and fiction are not always clear because
imagination is as operative interpreting facts as it is interpreting the meaning of fiction. A story also
can be a falsehood, a child’s fib. More serious are the variously motivated individual, organizational
and governmental narrative fabricated to justify, mislead or deceive. More innocently, the hoax is
a narrative that masquerades as reality.

CONTACT R. Curtis Bristol rcurtisbristol@verizon.net 1325 Eighteenth St., NW, Suite 101, Washington, DC 20036
Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver
2 R. C. BRISTOL

The preeminent example of a hoax is Orson Welles’s the War of the Worlds his Mercury his Mercury
Theater on The Air, a CBS regular program broadcast Sunday, prime time, October 30, 1938. Orson
Welles and his players adapted H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel by the same title depicting an invasion of the
British Isles by Martians. The aliens mercilessly kill the British with futuristic heat-ray weapons and
poisonous black smoke. Villages ruined, London in flight, the military defeated, civilization at a halt, the
victorious Martian occupiers are mysteriously annihilated by an ordinary, earthly bacteria for which they
had no immunity (Wells, 1897). A half century later, the Mercury Theater depicted the H.G. Wells story
in America broadcast as if breaking news in real time. In particular, following the network introduction,
Orson Welles gave a brief science fiction prologue from the original War of the Worlds, seamlessly
phasing into the moment exciting an estimated 32 million people just then listening to radio. The
government weather bureau reports atmospheric turbulence of undetermined origin over Nova Scotia,
now moving into the north east states, then blending into the regularly scheduled program of live
orchestra music. Several minutes later a news bulletin interrupts, reporting that a Chicago observatory
several hours earlier had detected on Mars several explosions at regular intervals that now appeared
headed toward earth. The musical program resumes only to be interrupted by a second bulletin reporting
that a Princeton Observatory famed astronomer has confirmed these events from space and that he will
soon be interviewed live on the air. More music and then from Princeton a reporter questions the
professor who doubts there is life on Mars, reassuringly adding that it is four million miles from earth.
Just then he gets a federal communique which is read aloud by the reporter: A fiery object crashed with
seismic power minutes before in a nearby New Jersey farm. The professor again reassures that it is likely
a meteorite. The radio-cast of live music continues, interrupted by further bulletins, and then shifts to the
crash scene, hearing eyewitness accounts of a giant spacecraft, the gathering curious crowd and arrival of
the state militia. Very soon strange appearing aliens emerge from the cylindrical spacecraft. Thus, begins
the CBS radio report of the Martian invasion of America.
What made the War of the Worlds believable was the unfolding, bizarre but related events
broadcast live on radio. A genius of narrative, staging and its delivery, Orson Welles became the
news himself, curiously conflating fiction and fact. It did not matter that his introduction of science
fiction or concluding acknowledgment the radio play was a Halloween prank, or that the Martians
were vanquished on the air, nor the Associated Press simultaneous on the air reports that none of
the CBS hour long broadcast was factual. The news of Martian invasion spread by word of mouth
and telephone and seriously alarmed America (Housman, 1972; Ntahonsigaye, 2018; Welles, 1938).
A century earlier another story telling genius, Edgar Allan Poe, aroused the nation with his The Sun
extra edition about an English balloonist’s three day crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Meticulously written,
naming a known balloonist, with scientific details and diagram, the event filled story, like that of Orson
Welles, was believed and spread by word of mouth even after the two-day later Sun editorial retraction
(Silverman, 1991).
Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Alert by radio, television, telephone and cell phone
emergency networks, that warned there was an inbound ballistic missile and to take immediate
cover, exclaiming the bulletin was not a drill. It was not a hoax either, but an instigated human error.
The official alert was instantly disseminated worldwide by cell phone, Facebook, Snapchat and
Twitter. In Hawaii there was understandable pandemonium, civic disruption and confusion that
was hardly ended by the 38 minute later retraction (Hawaii false missile alarm, 2018).
These historic narratives represent the ready confusion of fact and fiction from vastly different times,
circumstances and means of communication. Each had a reality-based back story, the collective narrative
of others, in which the new narrative was heard or read, comprehended and imagined and understood to
be real. For Poe there were the periodic advances of amazing technology and science learned about from
reliable newspapers; for Orson Welles there were the radio news and print commentary of Nazi
militarization, troop movements, fears of invasion and a world at war; and, especially focused in
Hawaii were the multiple media reports and commentary about the North Korean daily bellicose boasts
of its ballistic missile extended range. By these examples of the hoax and false report, reality is relative to
the moment when one literally tunes in or learns second hand, before the whole story is known.
 NARRATIVE, REALITY, AND IMAGINATION 3

A narrative has a beginning, middle and end, a truism since Aristotle’s Poetics. True for Athenian
tragedy but today the end of many narrative are more open ended. Narratives connects events but
does not necessarily resolve their reason for being, rather heightens attention, imagined outcomes
and further stories that are often – especially over time – a mix of imagined and real. Rather than
conclusions, narratives often create ambiguity and complexity. In current events and commentary,
examples are the renewed Cold War narrative and the resurgence of Russia in world power.
Generally, the ADHD afflicted, drug addled, cancer ridden, and numerous other down and out
stereotypes in real life and fiction, are no longer the last word, the end. Narrative has more
beginnings and midpoints than conclusions, and is more hopeful, interventionist and therapeutic
than the Aristotelian model of tragedy in place for hundreds of centuries.
The word narrative comes from the French into Middle English whose etymology is from the Latin verb
narrare, “to tell” or “recount”, and gnarus, the Latin adjective for “having knowledge” (Harper, 2000). The
tradition of narrative since Homer and Virgil gives authority to the story teller per se, sometimes blurring the
skill and knowledge of the narrator. The narrative truth often outlives the facts of the original story,
empowered by various elements. If the narrator is equated with the knowledge, the source of narrative is
equated to its believability by the audience as evident in the hoax and false report examples. For centuries
narrative has been differentiated by its source. For example, newsprint, commentary, memoir, biography,
autobiography and history may each cover the connected events of a single person or happening, but each
narrative structure is unique, a different story. This element of structuring a “factual” narrative contributes
to the current fragmentation of political news coverage and commentary, taking narrative ambiguity to the
extremes to be determined more by belief systems than fact. One can also tune in or tune out a narrative of
choice that reinforces beliefs already in place as if it is evidence for the truth.
The author is obviously a singular source of narrative, each with his/her inherent biases and beliefs that
give any story its salience slant, even its appeal. Fact versus fiction is another generic source of narrative, but
the media examples demonstrate the boundaries that are often obscure. Fact and the imagined were
famously admixed by Orson Welles (1941) cinema masterpiece, Citizen Kane, a fictional biography of
William Randolf Hearst, presented as the retrospective documentation of an obituary and mimicked the
popular March of Time cinema format. The RKO Pictures 20th Century Fox contract providing Welles
unprecedented creative rights when he was 25 years old was a direct consequence from his 2-year earlier
radio triumph, the War of the Worlds. While amidst the immediate uproar that he caused and the news
coverage he obtained, he denied any intention to mislead. Later at the Federal Communication Commission
and Congressional hearings, Orson Welles also denied any personal ambition motivated his live-on-the-air-
news-bulletin format for the War of the Worlds. But it was his last-minute idea to enhance the poor script by
his unenthusiastic Mercury Theater writers. His choice was brilliant theater, and fulfilled his ambition for
fame, literally overnight, an unique narrative of self.
Edgar Allan Poe also had a narrative of self, a personal motive. At The Sun newspaper he was
a very popular contributor, making the 10-year-old paper owners and editor richer while he
remained poor. The editor extolled his own virtues for truth in the news because of his personal
careful editing. The paper and its editor were seriously embarrassed by Poe’s “Ballon Hoax” as the
fraud was characterized then and still remembered (Bristol, 2001; Meyers, 2000).
Another form on narrative from life are the endless stories of romantic love. For centuries this genre
was worldwide especially handwritten notes and letters of endearment, originating in medieval French
Christian warriors and troubadours, and the fair maiden at court and jousting competitions. Serious love
stories are plentiful and romantic passion has retained in the twentieth century literature as the most
published theme of poetry (Bergmann, 1987). Truth in the moment of battlefield reality is abundant too,
the themes love and battle are often conflated, as the prototypical heroes of Sparta and the Iliad, or the
adventurous survivors in the Odyssey and Aeneid, each contributing to the concept of the narrative of self,
some real and others fiction, equally surviving as the collective narrative of others.
So much of lived experience is narrative-bound, like learning a language, conversation, education,
reading and writing, television, movies and social media. While the collective narrative of others is
directed by Darwinian natural selection, the narrative of self is autonomous in origin,
4 R. C. BRISTOL

individuals seemingly putting themselves together to provide their own critique and editing. Any
retraction, to tell or not, is a genre first represented by Augustine’s Confessions (397 AD). The
teleological explanation of the narrative of self and the collective narrative of others is that the
functions of narrative serve an essential need not only for the individual, but the greater society,
indeed, civilization. The examples of the War of the Worlds or Ballon Hoax fit some need of society
not just that of their authors. While continuing to evolve in complexity, narrative preserves some-
thing fundamental to mankind, a view of the past that is more than factual history but about motives
and choices, the symbol of something to know more and deeper about. The collective narrative of
others preserves the past to make sense of the moment, to connect events and make them mean-
ingful, to provide the material to construct a narrative of self. As William Faulkner observed, “The
past is never dead, it’s not even the past” (Faulkner, 1951).
Sigmund Freud recognized the fluidity of the past and present as a determinant force of mind. From
Sophocles’ drama he abstracted the Oedipus Complex, first recognized in the self-analysis of his own
dreams, and in later theory he made it central to psychosexual development. His Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) identifies the day residue (lived experience) that elicits the dream narrative consisting of
a manifest content, remembered the next day as dream fragments. The manifest content disguises the
aims and objects or sexual development, which is the latent content of conflicted unconscious past lived
history of wished for but unacceptable acts, desires and impulses that were censored from conscious
awareness, a process he called repression. Thus, he reasoned that forbidden thoughts and feelings
provided disguised satisfaction through dreaming getting past the psychic censor. 1900 also described
the secondary elaboration of a dream as the narrative making sense of the non-sensible, that is, making
a coherent story by imaginatively relating dream fragments as if events. Robert Lewis Stevenson credits
his masterwork, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), literally to this post dream process of
narrative construction that Freud later discovered in his dream studies. Presumably this classic originally
a nightmare turned to Gothic dark novella like other creative works, the dream itself, provides a disguised
preconscious satisfaction when writing and reading about the likes of an upstanding, thoughtful, curious
scientist and his double, a self- centered, monstrous killer that is, in fact, the doctor himself (Stevenson,
1886, 1888). This is the stuff of Freud before psychoanalysis, a return of the repressed in literature before
its psychoanalytic theory.
About narrative in general, Freud adduced the ubiquity of the family romance, that is the
conscious, current story (lived experience) that obscures the psycho genetics of actual past lived
experience in childhood that would be troublesome to remember as factual. His clinical observation
of childhood amnesia is now commonplace, that is childhood is more a self-constructed distillate
from others effecting explicit memory of lived experience absolutely for the first 2 years of life and
relatively up to 10 years of age. Nonetheless, the subjective awareness of the self unique and distinct
from others, whether from the theories of Freudian object relations, Ferenczi, Kline, Winnicott,
Fairbairn, or modern attachment theorists, is a fragile, neuropsychological precursor to the narrative
of self. Thus, the process of mind about the self and different others, begins before the consolidation
of memory (recall), awaiting hippocampus maturity that comes anatomically later. This means one
has a sense of self and other very early in life, far before what is remembered. Its spooky but
anticipated in Freud’s case studies that established the topography of the conscious and unconscious
minds. The theories he proposed regarding this two mindedness remain controversial, but not his
exploratory technique, the anamnesis. Introduced by Hippocrates in the age of Pericles, the ana-
mnesis or case history, puts current symptoms complained about into the context of the past lived
experience, a particular way to look at the narrative of self, which connects a patient’s factual and
imagined life events to establish a conclusion, the diagnosis. In this context Freud, recognized “new
editions” of past relationships of his patients brought forward from repression to the moment with
him, what he called transference. This condensation of the past and displacement to the present time
is a universal phenomenon in dreams and highlighted in the clinical transference, but important to
author and audience alike to recognize the double in creative literature made famous by Poe,
Stevenson and Dostoevsky before Freud.
 NARRATIVE, REALITY, AND IMAGINATION 5

More approachable as psychic phenomena outside the analytic office described by Freud are the
forgetting, misplacing and mishaps that are a part of the everyday narrative of self. More complicated
are re-enactments (Freud’s return of the repressed) of past lived experience enacted in the present,
not recognizing the origin belonging to the past. With a compulsion to repeat, a pathology of moral
masochism, there is a recapitulation that is sometimes humiliating or compromising to oneself,
a disadvantage enacted from unconscious origins, according to Freud, an unconscious sense of guilt
for incestuous feelings. Such unremembered past feelings and actions are frequent in romantic love,
enough so Plato identified the adult object of love is in fact a re-finding of the lost childhood object
of love and its past. This was Freud’s first psychoanalytic model of romantic love. Another
contribution to understanding the narrative of self was Freud’s interpretation of genius literature,
Shakespeare and Goethe, that could be interpreted like a dream revealing latent meaning not just of
the author, but in their works the fundamental workings of the mind at large. He believed that these
variable psychodynamics of memory, imagination and human relatedness were true for all people
everywhere including ancient cultures and not necessarily pathological. Thus, the dream, parapraxis,
humor, indeed, psychiatric symptoms and re-enactments, shared with myth and master literature
and ancient drama, a similar structure. They share the manifest and the latent content and the
psychodynamics of displacement, condensation and symbolic representation.
The “lived experience” of the psyche is often obscure and perplexing to comprehend complicated by the
problem of hermeneutics. The advances of neuroscience support some of Freud that are important to
understanding the narrative of self. For example, REM sleep dreaming engages unconscious memory,
imagery, imagination and language. These are the same mental systems engaged by conscious writing,
editing, reading, hearing or viewing narrative. There is more observational data than neuroscience about
unbidden memory, imagery and imagination, plentiful in psychoanalysis since Freud and free association.
Interestingly, Freud himself observed that his case histories (anamnesis), the evidence for his theories of
mind, read more like short stories than medical reports of his predecessors who established psychiatry as
a medical speciality. W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem paid tribute to Sigmund Freud honoring his new
creative perspective to how we can view our individual lives.
Historic narrative itself also has its own data about memory, imagery and imagination through
three millennia in place and evolving, a significant resource to draw conclusions. Like Scheherazade,
we remember, imagine and tell stories to stay alive, the narrative of self drawing upon the collective
narrative of other.
Lichtenberg (2017) traces the meaning of narrative to its intrauterine beginnings. By observa-
tion at the very least, narrative is evident between the mother and newborn. Narrative begins
literally with the first of lived experience and is necessary for survival. The initial central
organizing principle of narrative is the intersubjective, dyadic context of the newborn’s physical
reality and the nonverbal, one sided maternal spoken narrative, but bi-directional communication
between one and another baby and mother about the mutual perceptions of hunger-satiation,
discomfort-comfort, illness-vitality, messy- cleanliness, taking in-discharging, all of this and more.
Cries, frowns, pulling back, tantrums and body discharges are a reaching out for contact with
another and ever as important as smiling, cuddling, cooing and taking in. These interactions are
a nonverbal communication that anticipate the inherent capacity for words to express need, to
form a narrative about bodily experience and the narrative of self with others and the physical
environment. To be understood and to understand, at first by tactile skin, kinesthetic, facial
expression and physical gesture, odor, and the responsive of another, progressively becomes
mediated by protolanguage. This is initially about the physical world, yes, breast and mother,
others about too, father and siblings, but incrementally and inevitably increasingly by autono-
mous awareness, thought, anticipation and imagination about oneself and others, and increas-
ingly the capacity of language to express oneself about the self and others, and what more there is
to imagine. Beatrice Beebe’s infant-mother split camera studies of interactive behaviors document
by computation predict lifelong patterns established within the first months of life (Beebe et al.,
2010).
6 R. C. BRISTOL

Given the ontological idiosyncrasies that survive this dyadic, bidirectional beginning, amazingly,
a person is more or less to be unlike others, and vice versa, hence the commonness as well as differences
among people. Given the diversities of lived experience, narrative often converge into something
elemental and shared. Narrative between self and other has the inherent capacity separate from language
and culture to empathically approach the differences of time, sex, geography, ethnicity and the like, while
retaining its autonomy. The opposite, to fragment or annihilate others because of differences, is prevalent
in the history of both the individual and larger community. The example today is the troll farm
intentionally creating disharmony by exploiting differences. The consequence is one sidedness or
ambiguity, to sort out imaginatively. The problem to solve is how the narrative of self at any point,
may converge, coalesce with others into the collective narrative of others, the more or less shared
knowledge and values for the future. This perplexity may clarify by the advances of evolutionary and
computational psychology.
The expanded convention of the tabula rasa, is still a prevalent view that awareness and knowl-
edge derives from actual life experience and not from individual innate inborn qualities. Aristotle
observed in De Anima: “What (mind) thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on
a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind”
(Aristotle; Damasio 2018). This classical view holds that at birth the mind is a blank tablet awaiting
the stylus of lived experience. By contrast, the study of narrative per se demonstrates that lived
experienced once encoded, is brought back into awareness by association, imagination and the
capacities of memory and imagery. The mind is not simply a recording device. Even before the
innovation of writing, imagistic narrative was represented in the 40,000-year-old East Kalimantan
cave paintings. Studies of identical twins separated at birth predict innate mental capacities too, even
though the twins’ life experiences are different.
Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Frosshage (2017) reversed the initial premise to propose instead: “Lived
experience is a central organizer of narrative.” Expressed either way – “narrative” or “lived experience” – the
“central organizer(s)” engage memory, imagery, imagination and language, like Freud’s “dream specimen”
and the neuroscientist’s REM study. Language is an unique, inherent human capacity that in synchrony
with talent and imagination enlivens narrative gives it life through, irony and humor, as well as the
psycholinguistic prowess of allusion, paradox, analogy, simile, metaphor and the symbol. Such skills of
ancient story telling were adapted by the Romans who discovered narrative useful to the polemics of
political life and governing the empire. The ancient Greeks, using the example of Plato’s Aristophanes’
monologue in the Symposium (c 385–370 BC), were a power in narrative to persuade not rule. Aristophanes
argued love was re-finding and seeking likeness, sameness, oneness, the bringing together what in the
original past was united, but divided by Zeus out of envy of their joy. The separated parts longed for union
and sought this other half to reunite, to be whole again. It’s an interesting philosophic narrative given the
current world looking for likeness of kind by emphasizing differences and paradoxically further fragment-
ing the parts of a whole.
Among the pre-Greek Western civilizations, perception of events in nature (earthquakes, mon-
soon, etc.) were connected in narrative by what today would be identified as magical thinking or
fantastical imagination or a dreamed event. Another account of their reality base knowledge were
their elders, warriors, shamans and the women who provided for the virgins, pregnant, childbirth
and childcare, first expressions of a narrative of others demonstrated in the lived experience of any
particular group throughout civilization.
The paradigm of narrative and lived experience is expanded when “lived experience” includes the
awareness of its ancient origins, as well as one’s own narrative from dreaming, fantasy and parapraxis.
These are less known, less available, than external reality. Paid attention to as in psychoanalysis, this
source is significant to the preconscious structure of ones-self. Additional lived psychic phenomena are
daydreaming, uncanny intuition, oceanic feelings including religious and spiritual experience. These
intra-psychic realities admix in implicit and explicit memory systems with the external realities of actual
people and events as they occur, and together establish the subjectivity that shapes the narrative of self.
The prominent place of religious and political education, belief and activities are obviously curtailed in
 NARRATIVE, REALITY, AND IMAGINATION 7

this essay. The focus is on the psychology of memory, image and imagination in the narrative of self and
other and want to avoid controversy about imagination and belief systems that are raised by religious and
political differences. But the structure and the dynamics of the narratives of self and other are compre-
hending belief system narrative.
So narrative has its non-verbal and fundamental prototype in the mother infant dyad, and from the
beginning of innate language capacity is a spoken account of related events, initially the stories told in the
child album of the first years of life. These are often repeated in children’s stories and initial reader books.
Jack and Jill as experience, observation and language expand and became more complex, narrative
becomes the imagined as well as factual connection of events, and written by prose and meter as well as
spoken. Imagination becomes important to narrative as language and memory. The narrative of fact,
fiction or their combination, is about oneself, others, animals and nature as well as invented environ-
ments, happenings and creatures. Narrative is universal to all languages, cultures and religions, always
spoken before written and uniquely human. Usually narrative depicts the everyday, connected and
anticipated events, happenings, thoughts, expectations, images, feelings and motives among people over
times present, past or future. Narrative traditionally is strengthened in religious and social authority, by
humming and chanting. Spoken and written narrative have each been enhanced by props, acting, music,
sound effects and moving pictures. When telling, hearing or observing narrative, the boundaries of what
is real and imaginary are fluid. Intentionally and often by chance, particularly with creative narrative,
symbolic representation of universal meanings emerges, something important beyond the original
depiction. The meaning of symboic used here is a person, thing, event or action that represents an
abstraction, something more profound than the surface imagery of any single example. This is why some
narrative is more enduring than its initial author, audience or original theme, especially evident in
ancient myth and theater, the novel and cinema. A symbolic representation in narrative may preserve
something essential about people and the collective narrative of others over centuries empathic and
transcends differences of gender, race, language, culture and religion. The dream is a particular kind of
narrative constructed in sleep from everyday events in a manifest structure that obscures a latent
meaning, a personal as text of conflicted thoughts and feelings represented by symbols.
However, symbology brings up again the problem of hermeneutics. Originating with Aristotle regarding
the structure of language and logic, hermeneutics afterward came to be applied to translating not only word
and grammar but interpreting their divine meaning. While not always easy to make the distinction, most of
nonreligious western literature is not divine, rather secular, profane, often obscene and sometimes
pornographic. It does not require the exacting logic of Aristotle. There is considerable leeway to interpret
both language and imagery for oneself, about oneself and others. In fact, individual interpretation is central
to the narrative of self and individual imagination that sets oneself apart from the authoritarian, popular,
critical and scholarly views about life. This is demonstrated by the transformation of the religious frame to
the secular and personal evident in Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy, the Inferno.
Another narrative is the ubiquitous, anonymous story of disjointed events, facts and gossip,
rumor and hearsay at any particular moment when one tunes in. It is from everywhere about
everything by everyone, yet not a babble, rather a collective, curiously selective narrative about what
they say about friends and enemies at home and abroad, and in the family, neighborhood or at
school and workplace. Often declarative, it frequently takes disputed sides about what’s up with
people and what’s reported about them and events in Washington and rival capitals, Wall Street and
Hollywood, the sports world, personalities and fans. All this and more cryptically admixed with the
news about advances and set backs of science, technology, communication, health, religion, fashion
and the fine arts. There is always war talk from somewhere and natural disasters at home and abroad
predicted and actual. These bits and pieces are the general background of lived experience and the
most common source of the day residue for dreams, the stuff of identification for endless loves and
hates, fantasy stimulus, and the largest part of everyday conversation, social media and news. It is
a constant, never concluding and unresolvable, extravagant source for the imagination that gives it
energy and its source for the narrative of others. This narrative is what Aristotle described as the
8 R. C. BRISTOL

stylis marks made on the blank tablet, and what I identify as lived experience that contributes to the
narrative of others.
This abbreviated typology of narrative begs for expansion. Narrative has a gargantuan precedence:
Greek myth, drama and Homeric epic; Virgil’s Aeneid; the medieval of Dante, Machiavelli and
Cervantes; the Arthurian legend and romance novels; Elizabethan theater; the English and Russian
novels; uniquely American short fiction. From these sources Western civilization has established the
boundaries for the self and other in fiction and the real world and their expectations and motives
about matters of worth and prohibition. This tradition realistically and symbolically distinguishes the
measure of being human and how one and another fit in, measure up or not, like a Greek chorus.
This three millennia heritage through narrative is challenged by postmodern assumptions like the
inaccuracy of memory, relativism of historical meaning, the biases of observation, interpretation and
representation of historic fact, and recently, gender identity. Truth, reality and validity are defined by
the sense of the moment and one’s own opinion or interpretation. Such notions oppose historical
precedent and the political, military and/or religious authority, both past and present (Anderson,
1998; Aristotle; Beebe, 2018; Derrida, 1997).
There is another practical challenge to the paradigm of the narrative and lived experience that is
posed by the internet, social media, streaming, gaming and the smart phone and its limitless
applications. Each have introduced a new language, different way of thinking, complex thinking,
complex narrative typology and mechanism of communication, even questions of what constitutes
an authoritative source of immediate events, i.e., what is real?
At the very least reality is being redefined by pornography, virtual reality sites, saboteur web sites,
online gambling, massive data hacking, manipulation of polling and voting, troll sites, the last presiden-
tial tweet, fragmented and fake news and commentary, and more to come. Who and what source to
believe? What is reality, where is the truth? It shifts, becoming relative to the source and circumstances.
The academic and urban myth merge: What size is Facebook? Often quoted, as if Facebook was a nation,
it is the largest ever in the world, as of January 2017, 2.2 billion. That’s impressive, given the potential to
mine and abuse that data base, to direct its attention, suggest action, create ways of thinking, purchasing
to read thinking, purchasing and voting. Facebook announced it removed 2.2 billion fake accounts,
nearly half of the total subscribers (Wagner, 2019). Obviously this action was the result of an extensive
and costly research by Facebook, maybe influenced by threats of regulation and Congressional hearings.
The point is what a shift; a virtual “nation” diminished by half. What were the fake accounts doing there
and who are they? While there may be a data analysis available to answer such questions, the immediate
disparity of what’s real and fake evokes Orwellian angst.
More pertinent than just the numbers of accounts are the digital reality of the impersonal algorithm
that is empowered to direct political, business, marketing and opinion makers to select sectors of society
and influence how they react imaginatively and how they work, love/hate, buy, sell and vote. This
computer capacity to stealthily observe, collect, measure and use mass data is a paradigmatic shift of
narrative, like the inventions of writing, the printing press and its automation, radio, movies and
television. There is awesome power in the algorithmic narrative to challenge, fragment and defeat, and
simultaneously, to sustain, elevate and create, both competing for the view of reality. Nonetheless what
polarizes at one moment may unify and persuade at another. There is a dynamic to any narrative that
moves in the Western world according to its authenticity, including the postmodern example: Civil
Rights and Women's Liberation. The sexual revolutions are each robust with decades of opposed reality
prose, religious tracts, political harangue, educational accommodation, and fiction in print and at the
movies and TV. All these gradually but monumentally changed the public view, base values, institutional
standards and ultimately the law. Despite the acculturation of these social mores, the narrative of conflict
persists, and new narrative extends from the original, e.g., Black Lives Matter, #Me Too, #Believe Me
#LGBT and the movement for transgender equality.
Narrative began as storytelling, considerably before writing, enhanced as civilization grew more
complex dealing progressively with everyday reality, intra-psychic reality and now virtual reality and
digital reality. Aboriginal stories were mostly word of mouth about one’s genealogy, social status,
 NARRATIVE, REALITY, AND IMAGINATION 9

history of the beginning and a deity, remembering heroes, villains and battles, and the adverse events
of nature. The sources of the everyday world, its actual, fictional and virtual “realities” engage not
only thought and memory but imagination.
By imagination I mean beyond the make believe and pretend of childhood or the far fetched of a good
tale, not even genius creativity. Rather there are the innate, everyday, everyone's faculty for spontaneous,
unbidden and unanticipated ideas, facts, images, opinions, memories and feelings that are not immedi-
ately present as “reality” to the senses but in the mind’s eye. One is reminded of Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales, the Man of Laws, which tells the story of a blind man who “saw with the eyes of his mind.” (2220)
Such insight or apperception of what’s true to mind deeper than the surface presentation to the senses is
celebrated by the evolving narrative of self and other.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
R. Curtis Bristol, MD, is senior member, American Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytical
Association. He also worked as a clinical professor of psychiatry and the Co-Director of the postgraduate program in
Psychoanalytic Studies and Adjunct Professor in Liberal Studies at Georgetown University. He is a psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC.

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