Three facets of Roy Schafer are reflected in Retelling a Life: the analytic theoretician, the social critic, and the clinician.

Schafer the theoretician traces his lineage to Habermas, Ricoeur, and Wittgenstein, among others (p. ix) and to Loewald's 1960 paper on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in which the analyst is described as emerging as a new object for the analysand (p. 305). Schafer sees himself as a “modern” psychoanalyst opposing “mainstream” analysts. He believes that “metapsychology features an obsolete theory of the mind as a mental apparatus” (p. xiv) and adds that “Freud was a child of the Enlightenment … he provided a rationalistic, empiricist account of his methods … and conclusions” (p. 148). In contradistinction to this, Schafer's view is that “we have only versions