Understanding the Embodiment of Narrative in the Therapeutic Exchange
September 27, 2025
When the World is Too Much with Us
Mark Freeman, Ph.D.
Let me begin by confessing that I’m not a therapist. Nor, at the moment, am I in therapy. My hope, nevertheless, is that some of the thoughts I’m about to share with you will be relevant to your concerns. The main question I want to pose here is a deceptively simple one: How does what’s going on in the proverbial “wider world” affect us? Also, how, if at all, might we tease apart the “fundamentally personal” (as we might call it) and “broader sociopolitical”? To give you a sense of the challenge, let me give you a personal example by sharing a passage from a piece I did some time ago called “The mystery of identity” (Freeman, 2021).
During the course of a bicycle ride I took a while back, I arrived at the realization that I had been living under a cloud for some time. Not surprisingly, I also began to muse about why that might be. What had been going in my life on that may have led me to this state? Then again, was this even the right question to ask? What was the proper time frame for launching my search? (p. 81)
I went on to raise a number of possibilities in the piece, ranging from the perhaps genetically-induced “black moods” my father would sometimes suffer to having lost my mother a few years back after a lengthy period of dementia to the trials and tribulations of childhood, now somehow activated, perhaps. As far as I could tell, though,
Whatever was going on . . . seemed, felt, more recent. I was about to step down as chair of my department. Our oldest daughter would soon be getting married. Our other daughter had landed back at home, after having been away for a spell, and that would no doubt create some significant challenges. Things could sometimes be difficult with my wife. Two of my closest friends had suffered mightily at this time, and I had been alongside them, or had at least tried to be, in whatever way I could. I have begun to think about retirement. The wider world—especially the one created by our lunatic president and his acolytes—often seems utterly bathed in bad stuff, surely enough in itself to make one scream or weep. It can’t be any one of things—or at least I don’t think it can. Was it all of them, conspiring with one another in some sort of unconscious behind-the-scenes stew, their collective weight having fallen upon me? Or was something else altogether going on? (What?) (p. 82).
So, the main challenge at the time was to try discern, through recollection and reflection, through hindsight, some of the possible sources of what I was experiencing, what I was embodying, in the present. But the truth is, I don’t know that I was sufficiently attentive to what my embodied experience was telling me. I conjectured, raised possibilities, hypotheses. Maybe it was this. Maybe it was that. But I didn’t listen carefully enough to what I actually felt. Would doing so have helped me get a clearer sense of what was going on? Possibly—especially if a therapist was there beside me. But I’m not sure. The body does speak. But its language can be quite obscure.
Let me dig further into this obscurity by turning to what I just referred to as the wider world in greater depth and detail, this time moving in a different direction. Rather than looking backward and trying to discern the sources of my embodied mood, I’m going to just bring forth some images from the past week.
Last Sunday night I watched DJT get behind a podium and exhort the pregnant women of America to ditch their bottles of Tylenol, now. Gotta tough it out. He spoke with unabashed authority, as if he knew what he was talking about. Standing right beside him was a somewhat rumpled RFK Jr, all taut and muscular, ready to burst out of his too-tight suit.
I saw another image of DJT, all puffed up and swollen, gesticulating, pontificating, and scolding dignified leaders from all over the world at the UN, as if he was justified being there. Absurd. What must they all be thinking? So much for the world order. I feel like telling everyone how sorry we are about all this. . . .
Some other images and storylines emerge, some from the week, some from other times, both real and imagined. Pam Bondi, with her severe, disapproving gaze, also behind a podium, seeking to serve up justice in some way at the behest of her leader. And Karoline Leavitt, feverish with self-assured certainty and conviction. And Vance, Noem, Patel, Hegseth. Tariffs. Epstein. Measles. Putin. AI. Comey. Kimmel. Thawing permafrost in the Arctic, exploding—despite the alleged “con job” of climate change. Miller—whose wife just last week apparently referred to him as a “sexual matador.” No. . . , please. God help us.
And on and on and on. Just another week. I feel it, big-time. I’m guessing many of you do too. And yet there’s so much going on, ceaselessly, relentlessly, it’s hard to specify, with any precision, what this feeling is. It’s not a comfortable one; I can tell you that.
Let me hasten to acknowledge that my own visceral response to these images and storylines is vastly different than others, maybe some of you here today, who may live in completely different narrative worlds. You have your own discomforts, your own unease. Some of you may be utterly enraged at how I’m presenting all this. I don’t presume embodied commonality, political or otherwise. I can’t, and shouldn’t. Knowing this, and feeling it, adds another element, a kind of agonistic tension, to the visceral mix. The relational fabric feels frayed, very frayed, like it’s unraveling.
Some other images, of a different sort, farther away. Blocks and blocks of rubble, buildings demolished, people weeping, pitifully gaunt children being carried, unable to walk. A great big fireball in another city, far away, in Ukraine. More devastation. Sudan, really far away, both on our radar and off. There’s also the boat from Venezuela, pulverized, maybe vaporized. People too. “The Executing Branch,” as a piece in the New York Review called it.
Meanwhile, one night, I dreamed about some guys from ICE, in brown robes, kind of like the ones monks wear, with sack-like bags over their heads. Actually, on second look, they’re kind of reminiscent of the Klan too. They want to inspect our car. I don’t think we have anything—or anything in particular—to fear. But I do.
Just writing these words [I wrote] is putting me in a . . . place. And when I go outside with my wife to walk our dog, I carry this place with me, in me. It’s beautiful outside. I do see that and feel it. But there’s the usual litter, the gross remnants of other dogs and their care-free owners, and a shiny black Audi, next door, with a license plate bordered with God Bless America. My wife generates a little small talk; she can probably tell I’m somewhere else. But I stay silent for the most part, closed off. The world can indeed be too much with us (Wordsworth).
I feel assaulted virtually every day by what goes on in the world. There is rage, confusion, sorrow, horror, fear, shock, shame, oftentimes all smushed together into an uncomfortable, anxious, at times debilitating nausea. I also feel encumbered and depleted at times, undernourished by what is Good.
That’s not all I feel, of course. There’s some good and wondrous stuff too. But it’s often dwarfed, overwhelmed by all the muck and evil. The resulting depletion can make being in relation with others, even those we love, more clouded and tenuous. It can be harder to be called out of myself. I wonder whether, and how, this might play itself out not only in the people you serve but also in yourselves and what you bring—what you’re able to bring—to the other and to the therapeutic relationship.
In a piece I did some years back, titled “Discerning the history inscribed within,” I began with much the same, quite vexing question with which I began today:
How does the world affect us? Specifically, how do the various phenomena that we encounter in the world—from concrete historical events to mediated representations, as may be found in books and films and other such “secondhand” sources—permeate us and become inscribed in memory? One might also ask: Where does all of this information “go” after we have encountered it, and how is it metabolized? Some dimensions of such experiences no doubt dissipate or even, perhaps, disappear. Other dimensions, however, seep into our psyches [and our bodies] often in ways unbeknownst to us, thus becoming part of what is herein called the narrative unconscious. (p. 65)
Some of you may be familiar with this idea. As I went on to suggest later in the piece,
In considering the narrative unconscious, that vast region of existence we call “the past” expands, moves beyond the particulars of “my life,” into the world. The challenge of telling its story expands in turn. For this story is no longer bounded, no longer tied to that stretch of time between birth and death, no longer tied to discrete episodes and events, and indeed no longer tied to me alone but to the entire world through which my life acquires its distinctive meaning and form. (p. 80)
How does one tell these sorts of stories? How does the body enter the picture, and what sorts of clues can the body provide? What are some of the implications for the therapeutic exchange when the fundamentally personal, as I called it earlier, is thoroughly intermixed with the sociopolitical? And what are the therapeutic aims?
I think I’ll leave it to the therapists here to answer these. . .
References
Freeman, M. (2018). Discerning the history inscribed within: Significant sites of the narrative unconscious. In B. Wagoner (Ed.), Handbook of Culture and Memory (pp. 65-81). Oxford University Press.
Freeman, M. (2021). The mystery of identity: Fundamental questions, elusive answers. In M. Bamberg, C. Demuth, & M. Watzlawik (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Identity (pp. 77-97). Cambridge University Press.