Science and Story

Abstract

Drawing especially on an important essay by Martin Heidegger entitled »Science and Reflection« (1977), it is argued in the present essay that that narrative inquiry can pave the way toward a more expansive and indeed adequate understanding of science than is generally found in the social sciences. This issue was brought to the fore early on in Freud’s career upon his realization that his case studies read like short stories and that they lacked »the serious stamp of science.« Consoled by the fact that »the nature of the subject« was responsible for this and that more traditional scientific procedures «[led] nowhere,« he would continue with such narrative work and, through it, continue to fashion and re-fashion psychoanalytic theory. Freud therefore arrived at something of a paradox: even while by traditional standards his case studies seemed questionable in regard to their scientific utility, it was precisely these studies that yielded the desired understanding. This suggests that the meaning of »science,« as customarily conceived, is problematically restrictive and that it ought to be reconceived in such a way as to include, rather than exclude, the kinds of literary pursuits that narrative psychologists have found to be so central to their efforts to understand and explain the movement of human lives.