Content area
Full Text
Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis, by Roy Schafer. Basic Books, New York, 1992, 328 pp. US$30.00. Reviewed by James Naiman.
Three facets of Roy Schaf er 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 of the true and real" (p. xv), and that "when we speak of true or false accounts of actions, we are positioning ourselves in a matrix of narratives that are always open to examination as to their precritical assumptions and values" (p. 55), and therefore "each telling presents only one possible version of the action in question ... narrating ... developing a storyline ... make up the core vocabulary of the narrational approach" (p. xiv). In this context "Insight refers to those retellings which make a beneficial difference in a person's ... life" (p. xv).
The distinction between these two positions was clearly articulated by Charles Hanly in his 1990 paper "The Concept of Truth in Psychoanalysis" (Int. J. Psychoanal. 71: 375-383). Freud adhered to the correspondence theory of truth, that truth consists of a degree of correspondence between an object and its description. Schafer adheres to the coherence theory, the view that truth is some sort of ideal coherence of beliefs with each other and with our experience, so that...