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.

关于“叙事连贯性”和“自传能力”的理论思想在当代治疗文化中仍然盛行，并且经常被用于服务于患者产生能够讲述自己故事的叙事“我”。在这里，通过提出短篇小说形式作为在精神分析中讲述自我的替代模型来反驳对自我小说描述的偏好。爱丽丝·门罗的“木星的月亮”，寓言中短篇小说形式的根源，以及对弗洛伊德的图腾和禁忌的重读，被用来阐明短篇小说如何被视为与自我起源平行的典范故事。与对方的认同。