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Retelling a Life grew out of Schafer's action language, which he has contrasted with metapsychology, characterized as an obsolete, mechanistic conceptualization of the mind as a mental apparatus. The source of the patient's actions is not a mechanistically conceived apparatus or structure but the person himself. In this way,
Schafer anticipated Brenner's (1992) discarding the structural model and replacing the id, ego, and superego with the person. In the past, Schafer wrote of a superordinate self and subordinate selves (self-as-agent, self-as-object, and self-as-place). Schafer now rejects the notion of multiple selves, including Kernberg's “good” and “bad” selves and Kohut's “grandiose self.”
Action is anything a person may be said to do; this includes his overt behavior and mental processes. In analysis, these actions are presented as narratives, defined as particular accounts or versions of actions that are selected from several possible meanings; narratives also include accounts the person may give of happenings, which are events, such as rainstorms, in which the person's own agency played no part. Storylines are self-narratives, or stories the person tells about himself or herself; they are analogous to what Arlow (1969a, 1969b) called unconscious fantasy; Schafer contrasts his treatment of the concept with Arlow's by pointing to his own attention to narrative expression in addition to fantasy content.
The foregoing paragraphs are an attempt to portray the conceptual framework of this volume. I use the word attempt partly because Schafer himself had difficulty defining narration and storyline. In each case he gave an initial definition, which he regarded as insufficient, and expressed the hope that subsequent material would “fill in many of the major meanings” (p. xv) and “bring home what I mean” (p. 30).
The work is divided into four parts: Narrating the Self, Narrating Gender, Theories as Master Narratives, and Versions of Practice. The parts have among them