The psychological subject is preeminently a textual being, born of a confluence of discursive practices. In generating the sense of a subject to be elucidated, the investigator can scarcely escape tradition; to do so would be to fail in achieving intelligibility. Yet, molding character from the available repositories of discourse is a precarious undertaking. Accounts of character e what it is to be a coherent and identifiable person e are first of all possessions of the populace. They are central constituents of ordinary language conventions and, as a result, intimately intertwined in daily patterns of human relationship. Thus, when people speak of their intentions, beliefs, wants, hopes, fears, and the like, they are not only generating and solidifying agreements concerning the ontology of personal being, they are also carrying out patterns of relationship in which such terms are essential integers. (The utterance I adore you not only asserts the condition of adoration to be a central essence of human beings, but simultaneously participates in a form of relatedness that equally determines what it is to be human.) The psychologist's position is thus precarious in two senses: first with respect to his/her symbiotic relationship with the existing language communities and second with respect to the life forms that such writing may either disturb or destroy.1 It is the question of achieving intelligibility that is the chief focus of the present paper. The textual construction of the person is critical not only for novelists, biographers, and autobiographers; it is also of pivotal importance to historians, political scientists, legal theorists, philosophers of knowledge, psychologists, and many others. All are challenged with the problem of rendering in words a sense of recognition, a sense that I know and understand the person whereof they speak. At the same time, in all these cases the writer is faced with a subtle but consequential problem: he or she must rely on the discursive forestructure supplied by the culture and yet perishes by its repetition. The writer must rely on the existing argots of understanding or cease to be intelligible. To write of someone who feels pickle or who wishes in the horizontal fails in the cooperative achievement of making sense. At the same time, to reproduce the existing forestructure is to fail in generating moments of distinction - a sense that the subject is significant, worthy of distinction in the ongoing hurly-burly of daily activity. If the writer does not estrange the audience from the commonplace, voice is lost. At worst, the writer simply expands the domain of tedium. How is it then that the professional psychologist, as a writer, navigates between the shoals of the banal and the absurd, making claims about human nature that are simultaneously at variance with the commonplace? The problem is interesting from
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