"Familiar Artifice": Ways of Telling in the Short Story, Psychoanalysis, and Alice Munro's "The Moons of Jupiter". (February 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Rizq, Rosemary
• Is Part Of: Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Volume 70:Number 1(2022)
• Page Start: 77
• Page End: 102
• Publication Date: 2022-02
• Subjects: Alice Munro -- fable -- identification -- narrative coherence -- short story -- Totem and Taboo; Psychoanalysis -- Periodicals; 616.891705
• DOI: 10.1177/00030651221077312
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0003-0651

Abstract

Theoretical ideas about "narrative coherence" and "autobiographical competence" remain prevalent in contemporary therapeutic culture, and are frequently deployed in the service of the patient's producing a narrative "I" that can tell its own story. A preference for novelistic accounts of the self is countered here by proposing the short story form as an alternative model for the telling of a self within psychoanalysis. Alice Munro's "The Moons of Jupiter, " the roots of the short story form in fable, and a rereading of Freud's Totem and Taboo are used to illuminate how the short story may be seen as an exemplary tale paralleling the origin of the self in its identification with the other.