The Self in Narrative Therapy: Thoughts From a Humanistic/Existential Perspective Alphons J. Richert Western Illinois University This article briefly reviews the narrative and humanistic/existential ap- proaches to conceptualizing self. In it, the author explores the possibility of a theoretical integration of these 2 positions on the basis of E. T. Gendlin’s (1962, 1968, 1981, 1996, 1997) work on experiencing and its role in the development of meaning, particularly as it relates to the distinction between the I and the Me used in narrative theory. The implications of this integration for (a) development of the landscape of consciousness and particularly of the idea of I as narrator/agent and (b) the potential value of examining the manner of making choices in narrative treatment are examined. Throughout the history of psychotherapy—from Sigmund Freud on- ward—a common theme across therapies, with the possible exception of “hard core” behavioral approaches, has been that one of the overarching objectives of treatment is to enable the client to behave more flexibly. While not all approaches to treatment have understood such an increase in flexibility as a function of client choice or will, the narrative and the hu- manistic/existential traditions have thought of treatment in this way. Rog- ers (1951, pp. 132–141; Tomlinson, 1967), in discussing the change process in therapy, described how the client becomes less dependent on external standards for judging self and behavior and how, as a consequence, the client’s behavior becomes more flexible and less predictable, guided more by the client’s “organismic valuing.” Existential theorists (e.g., Bugental, 1987; Bugental & Sterling, 1995; Yalom, 1980) have been outspoken about the importance of the client’s free choice as essential to both the process and the outcome of psychotherapy. These traditions have rooted this pro- cess of choice in a well-articulated, highly individualized concept of self. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alphons J. Richert, Department of Psychology, Western Illinois University, 1 University Circle, Macomb, Illinois 61455. E-mail: a-richert@wiu.edu 77 Journal of Psychotherapy Integration Copyright 2002 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2002, Vol. 12, No. 1, 77–104 1053-0479/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//1053-0479.12.1.77 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Narrative approaches to treatment also imply the importance of free choice in both the process and outcome of treatment. Central to the pro- cess of narrative therapy is the identification by the client of what are variously referred to as unique outcomes (White & Epston, 1990) or spark- ling moments (Monk, 1997) and the decision by the client as to whether these are preferred to the state of affairs existing under the problem- saturated narrative. White (1993, p. 35) extended this idea to the broader area of therapy outcome when he stated, using Bourdieu’s (1988) terms, that one objective of narrative treatment is to foster the client’s “reappro- priation of the self,” allowing the client to have a wider range of choices, free from the constraints of certain culturally dominant narratives. However, oftentimes little is said in the literature on narrative treat- ment about “who” does the choosing and what processes might be involved in making a choice. In other words, although personal agency is typically assumed, this idea seems to have received less attention from a narrative perspective than it has in the humanistic/existential tradition. McLeod (1997) has made clear that this is not an accidental oversight, at least from a social constructionist perspective, when he said that “in narrative con- structionist therapies, the concept of the individual self is supplanted by that of the person ” (p. 91). He elaborated this contrast by stating the following: Traditionally, the psychodynamic and humanistic therapies, informed by a notion of an “autonomous bounded self,” have focused therapeutic attention on the inner life of the person. Postmodern therapies, on the other hand, have been based more on ideas of a relational self and as a result have paid more attention to what goes on between people rather than within them. (McLeod, 1997, p. 87) Processes of choosing, which are clearly important in narrative approaches to treatment, used to be understood as “functions” of self in humanistic/ existential theories. How choices are made when a concept of relational self is used is not entirely clear. Although narrative theorists clearly assert that choosing is something that a person simply does, such a position leaves a gap in the understanding of the process of change in therapy from a narrative perspective—a conceptual gap that may also unnecessarily limit therapeutic practice. This gap, of course, is an understanding of how choices are made and is the allied question of whether the process of choosing can, in itself, ever be an appropriate focus of therapeutic attention in a treatment informed by narrative thinking. The central argument of this article is that the practice of narrative therapy would be enriched by an integration of humanistic/existential ideas regarding self and agency into narrative theory and treatment. Specifically, I propose that it can be useful to give more direct attention to the process of making choices in narratively informed treatment, and that humanistic/ Richert 78 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. existential thinking regarding self and the process of making of meaning can be a valuable source of ideas for developing ways of approaching issues of choosing. CONSTRUCTIVIST PERSPECTIVES ON SELF Although some thinkers within the area of constructivist/narrative therapy would banish the concept of self from their thinking and treatment, this position represents one end of a spectrum and is certainly not univer- sally accepted within the constructivist/narrative tradition. As Neimeyer (1997) and Doan (1997) made clear, there is enormous diversity among thinkers in the constructivist tradition on a variety of issues, including how to conceptualize the individual. The following brief overview is not in- tended to be comprehensive and is presented to help readers understand more clearly the position I take in suggesting an integration between nar- rative and existential/humanistic ideas with regard to self. Following the classification of constructivist approaches offered by Rosen (1996), one end of the spectrum of constructivist thought is the position taken by radical constructivists who assert that the mind is an autonomous and closed knowing system that constructs reality. This “strong” position does not seem to have attracted much attention from narrative therapists (Doan, 1997) and is not discussed further here. However, the position taken by the social constructionists (Rosen, 1996) has become central to most postmodern thinking about psycho- therapy. Like the radical constructivist, social constructionists eschew any notion of a reality that exists independent of human knowledge of it. However, they differ markedly from the radical constructivists in arguing that it is not individual minds that construct reality but that reality is socially constructed; in other words, meaning does not exist within but between people (Gergen, 1985; Goolishian & Anderson, 1987; Harre ́ & Gillett, 1994). From the social constructionist perspective, self is simply a socially constructed concept like all other concepts and, as such, has no special importance or claim to explanatory power in understanding human behavior. McLeod (1997) stated this position clearly when he said the following: From this perspective the modern “self” is not an entity but is a construction. People in other cultures do not operate with such a sense of self (Landrine, 1992; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). The idea of the autonomous, bounded self can there- fore be understood as part of the cultural system within which we live. We can then deconstruct the notion of “self,” we can examine the ways in which it is used, what it does . (p. 91) These theorists reject the concept of self as being essentialist and prefer to use the concept of “person” (McLeod, 1997), who is understood to be an The Self in Narrative Therapy 79 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. active agent engaged in intentional activity as well as a social being. They have argued that the sense of self held by this active intentional agent is, however, not some internal defining essence, but is a set of positions, taken up in social networks, that is based on a person’s skills for and actions in dialoguing within this social network (Cox & Lyddon, 1997; Harre ́ & Gil- lett, 1994). Russell and Wandrei (1996) discussed the performative nature of language by which they mean that, in some instances at least, saying does not merely describe but generates the very state of affairs being described. Auerbach (1985) extended this type of analysis to the use of the word I in explaining how, from a social constructionist point of view, a person con- structs identity through the use of this pronoun. Inherent in the idea that a person constructs identity through interac- tion with another person, rather than it being something that he or she brings to the encounter, is the corollary that identity is not unitary but multiple and always changing as people renegotiate their relationships with one another (Cox & Lyddon, 1997; Hermans, 1996; Markus & Nurius, 1986). This social constructionist perspective on identity is taken up by some, but not all, authors developing narrative approaches to treatment (Freedman & Combs, 1996; White, 1993; White & Epston, 1990). From this perspective, self would not be accorded any special importance in under- standing the choice of preferred outcomes or the exercise of active agency. Rather than underlying these activities, self would be seen as created in the performance of them and the act of choosing would have to be understood in some other way. The social constructivist way of thinking about self and choice is cer- tainly useful in helping therapists and their clients to see beyond the con- straining effects of many commonly held social discourses, thereby opening a wider range of options for action as narrative therapists suggest. Yet, at the very least, this line of thinking keeps the process of choosing out of the consulting room. Rather than the process of choosing itself being a poten- tial focus in therapy, it is assumed by narrative theories that people will simply choose among their “preferred outcomes” once these are identified and that they will actively (“agentically”) pursue them. In many instances of actual treatment, this is no doubt an accurate description of what happens. However, as every practicing therapist rec- ognizes, progress toward the client’s goals is often a complicated, nonlinear process, one marked by hesitancy, uncertainty, and sometimes outright ambivalence in the client’s experience of defining and moving toward his or her goals. This aspect of treatment is only sometimes considered in the literature on narrative therapy (e.g., Freeman, Epston, & Lobovits, 1997), and rarely in theoretical discussion. Indeed, Burnette (1995) has argued that invoking the idea of a person as a freely choosing agent necessarily reintroduces essentialism into narrative therapy. He stated that “if global, Richert 80 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. unitary, power/knowledge discourses both oppress and form persons, and if those persons can somehow freely select and live out a story of their own making, then they must have an essential self” (Burnette, 1995, p. 7). There is yet a third position within the constructivist spectrum that Rosen (1996) termed critical constructivism . This perspective differs from both radical constructivism and social constructionism in arguing that a reality does exist “out there” independent of individuals’ attempts to know it. The critical constructivists argue that people can never know this reality. Watzlawick (1996) termed this reality first-order reality and argued that people contact it only through raw, meaningless sensory experience. There- fore, according to this view, people construct a second-order reality, which is the level at which individuals attribute sense or meaning to perceptions. Within this second-order reality people live their daily lives, and it is af- fected by first-order reality only in so far as first-order reality may con- strain, but never determine, second-order reality. Watzlawick expressed this idea in terms of a person only being able to know first-order reality in terms of what it is not. Critical constructivism also differs from social constructionism in that, while it readily acknowledges the strong influence of culture and more local social systems such as communities and families upon how people construct their second-order realities, it also maintains that the individual may make an independent contribution to the construction of his or her second-order reality. In other words, this position allows for the possibility that at least some meaning is generated intraindividually rather than all meaning being generated solely between people, as is maintained by the social constructionists. As mentioned previously, some narrative therapy thinkers adopt a social constructionist view of self, whereas others (e.g., Elliott & Green- berg, 1997; Fonagy, 1997; Gonc ̧alves, 1995; Guidano, 1995; Parry, 1997; Schafer, 1992) have proposed that people have a common core to their identity that is consistent across situations. Most often, these authors have argued that self is made up of I, the narrator, and Me, the protagonist in a person’s stories through which self is defined and lived (Elliot & Green- berg, 1997; Fonagy, 1997; Gonc ̧alves, 1995; Guidano, 1995; Parry, 1997). In this view, the I, as narrator, is often understood, though not by all who use this approach, as having a privileged position from which all of the Me s can be seen and as serving to coordinate them in an overarching narrative that is sometimes thought of as drawing on cultural mythical themes (McAd- ams, 1993). The I as the constructor of an integrating narrative can be understood as making an independent contribution to the construction of the reality of self. This position seems to be close to the thinking of the critical constructivists and distinct from that of the narrative therapists more influenced by social constructionism who are less likely to use the The Self in Narrative Therapy 81 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. idea of I as the “master narrator” and who view coordination and coher- ence among the various Me s as stemming from dialogic interchange among them (Hermans, 1996, 1997). According to the narrative view of self under discussion here, self is understood as being at once an independent organizing process and rela- tional in nature (Cox & Lyddon, 1997). The various Me s enact and, in so doing, at once tell and coauthor relatively situation-specific stories to which the significant others in these situations also make a contribution. In each of these tellings of parts of the self-story, there is then at once a presen- tation of and a reworking of self. This process provides a constant flow of fresh experience from which the I as narrator constructs an overarching narrative or personal myth that serves to give coherence and stability to the various Me s. Cox and Lyddon, following Grotevant’s (1993) thinking, ar- gued that such a conceptualization of self is useful in understanding the diversity, flexibility, continual change, and coherence that is characteristic of the self. Cox and Lyddon (1997) stated the following: This construct of self as active “narrator agent organizer,” the I and me of a story, allows for the integration and coherence of self over a lifetime of temporally grounded events and external changes (Grotevant, 1993, p. 123). Just as a written story possesses a beginning, a middle, and an end, so too is one’s life perceived as progressing temporally, in a sequential and meaningful pattern. (p. 212) They also pointed out that the development of a plot pulls together diverse elements into a meaningful whole that has a direction to it. The I as master narrator is, then, understood as making an independent contribution to the structuring of the self-story and, in this way, agency as “residing” in the I as narrator can be seen. In summary, narrative therapists informed by the social constructionist view of self argue that there is no unique “core” to the individual. There is a person, who actively chooses, but he or she chooses among alternatives that are shaped by social processes in which he or she is an active partici- pant. In making these choices, he or she defines a self that is specific to that situation. Coordination among these “situational selves” is argued by some in this tradition (e.g., Hermans, 1996) to be achieved by dialogues among the various selves just as the definition of self in each situation is achieved by social dialogue. By contrast, some narrative therapists informed by a more critical constructivist perspective argue that self is better understood in terms of I as a narrator who coordinates the subplots of various Me s into an integrated narrative. In performing the coordinating activity, the I as narrator is understood to make an independent contribution to the con- struction of reality and can be argued to be the “location” of agency. It is this latter, critical constructivist, I and Me conceptualization of self that appears to me to offer the best possibility of integrating narrative and Richert 82 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. existential/humanistic thinking. Additionally, it is the perspective that is used as a basis for this integration in the remainder of this article. THE POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTION OF EXISTENTIAL/ HUMANISTIC THINKING ABOUT SELF By taking this position, therapists have gained nothing if all that is accomplished is to relocate agency to a different abode—to remove it from the fray of actual interaction with others and place it in “splendid isolation” within the head, as Harre ́ and Gillett (1994) might have argued—without clarifying the processes involved in acting freely. Of course, I do not think that such is the case, but rather taking this perspective opens the possibility of examining the processes by which individuals make choices and in so doing contribute to structuring their reality. It is important to keep in mind that from the existential/humanistic perspective adopted here, choices im- ply action in the real world; they actively involve individuals with the world beyond themselves, the most important elements of which are other people. Yalom (1980) has argued that from an existential perspective, a “choice” that does not involve a commitment to action in the world is no choice at all. Thus, the point in examining these internal processes is not to assert some sort of primacy of personal over social processes in the con- struction of reality. Indeed, choice implies action in a social arena where the social processes of meaning generation certainly do operate. There are, however, important internal processes as well, and the goal here is to examine the interplay of these processes. I begin by looking more closely at the individual’s contribution to the coauthoring process. Various authors in the narrative tradition have suggested what I think are fruitful lines for developing an understanding of self and the process of choosing as part of the individual’s contribution to the construction of his or her reality. Gonc ̧alves (1994) proposed a link between narration and existentialism in the generation of meaning, arguing that creating meaning is likely to involve a person learning “how to construct his or her narrative emotional experiences using the experiential strategies of activation, fo- cusing, and symbolizing” (p. 114). Guidano (1995) pointed in a similar direction when he stated the following: Given that, as human beings we cannot escape our particular way of being—which is fleshbound and animal—such a stance requires a central acknowledgment of the embodiment of human experience. The second basic point in this framework is that the ordering of our world is inseparable from our experiencing of it. We do, in fact “experience it,” or more accurately, we “experience.” The it is an objectification, however, and hence, implies a distancing between the experiencer and the living moment. (p. 94) The Self in Narrative Therapy 83 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. In a similar vein, Parry (1997)—in a discussion of how individuals listen to their own stories as a way of moving past them—talked about what he termed soul-listening . In defining this term, he stated the following: The narrated identity is the portion of the soul accessed to achieve the most ad- vantageous social presentation. It is the part of the soul that gives us the illusion we are in control. It is more likely that while self proposes soul disposes. As an ex- pression and extension of our embodiement, it is self-organizing [italics added]. (Parry, 1997, p. 125) Despite the divergence in terminology, there is a common theme among these authors from the narrative tradition; namely, that central to the functioning of the I as organizing narrator is contact with a felt sense of embodied living. This idea provides a link between narrative and existential/humanistic thought with regard to the development and functioning of self. The idea of humans as embodied and experience as being lived before it is crystal- ized into languaged concepts is an idea that is central to existential think- ing. Within existentialism, the generation of explicit meaning is understood as occurring through an interchange between symbols and a preverbal or tacit experience of living, which does not contain meaning but has the potential to be developed into meaning (Gendlin, 1962; Heidegger, 1962). Probably no one has done more to develop this line of thought in psychology, and philosophy, than Eugene Gendlin (1962, 1968, 1981, 1996, 1997). At the risk of oversimplifying Gendlin’s complex argument on the creation of meaning, his basic ideas can be stated as follows. Simply by virtue of being alive, each person has a tacit bodily sense of living in any given situation that Gendlin (1962) has variously referred to as “felt im- plicit” or “more” or “intricacy” (Gendlin, 1997). This bodily sense does not contain meanings but is rather a direct ongoing sense of living and being, in whatever situation one is living in at the moment (Gendlin, 1962, 1997). Gendlin (1997) stated the following: Experiences, (situations, people, practices . . . .) do not consist of fully formed giv- ens that our articulations could just represent. Speaking from situations does not make copies or approximations. Speaking is like living and acting; what we say changes and develops what we say it “was.” (pp. 31–32) Meaning, then, is created when symbols—which may be images, sounds, touch, and, of course, words (among other things)—interact with this lived “felt implicit” or “intricacy.” Additionally, as is clear from the above- indicated quote, this very act of creating meaning changes one’s lived experience. This change is the heart of the concept of “carrying forward” (Gendlin, 1962, 1997), and Gendlin has made clear that only certain mean- ings will result in carrying forward. The fact that only certain meanings will carry forward the lived experience constrains the meanings that can be Richert 84 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. generated (Gendlin, 1962, 1997), making clear that there is a bodily, lived process, prior to symbolization (narration), that is essential to the process of meaning creation. The implication of Gendlin’s thinking for conceptualizing the indepen- dent contribution of self to the generation of meaning as well as to the issue of agency is that his analysis suggests that a person develops meanings by careful attention to his or her lived experience in the moment. These meanings are not arbitrary and simply “thought up” by an individual be- cause only certain meanings will carry forward the lived experience. This is an independent process of meaning creation because it does not depend on socially negotiated meaning; yet it is a process that is firmly rooted in an individual’s immersion in the world that includes his or her connectedness with other people. One further implication that is worth noting here is that because this process of meaning generation is rooted in bodily lived expe- rience, it will, necessarily, be shaped by those basic issues in living that existential thinkers have long seen as central to the human condition: freedom, isolation, meaninglessness, and the encounter with nonbeing (Bu- gental & Sterling, 1995; May & Yalom, 1989; Yalom, 1980). What sort of conceptualization of self does introducing this existen- tially based understanding of the creation of meaning suggest and how does it help therapists think about the issue of choice? Whereas for the narrative therapists in the social constructionism tradition self is story, or a collection of stories, the blending of experiential/existential and critical constructivist thinking proposed here suggests that self can usefully be understood as the process of storying, which includes the process of carrying forward felt meaning, as well as the telling of a story, with story and experiential mean- ing being in constant, reciprocal interaction. 1 In the critical constructivist/narrative conceptualization sketched ear- lier, self is the story, and critical to the structure of that story is the interplay between the I, the coordinating narrator, and an array of Me s, the pro- tagonists in the various situationally specific themes or subplots within the overall narrative. In the formulation I am suggesting here, this conceptu- alization is retained. Self is still understood as constituted by the story that one tells others and oneself, including the idea of a coordinating I, or narrator, and Me s, or multiple self aspects. Neither the I nor the Me alone, but the narrative is the self. The I can be understood as at once a “content” or character in the narrative and as a perspective or process of relating to 1 Although Gendlin (1962, 1997) does not explicitly discuss units of meaning in aware- ness, the implication of my use of the term experiential meanings is that they are smaller bits of meaning than are entire stories. A new experiential meaning can have implications for the entire self-story, but, as I use the terms here, would not constitute the whole fabric of a new narrative of self. The Self in Narrative Therapy 85 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. one’s experience. Similarly, the Me s can be thought of as characters in the narrative and processes of relating to others (and the inanimate world). What is added is the idea that the I as narrator (an aspect of self) is, specifically, a process of carrying forward felt experience, thereby inde- pendently generating meaning. In other words, this view of self proposes that self is at once the story told and the process of telling, with the process of telling always involving the carrying forward of lived experience. This perspective on self suggests that awareness of self as author is an important aspect of self. It is important to understand that I as narrator/meaning creator does not stand outside of the story. It is not some sort of “interior essence” that puts together a script that is then acted out. The relationship between the experiential process of carrying forward—central to telling the story—and the story told is reciprocal. The I, both as process and content, is firmly embedded in the story and shaped by it, even though it represents a unique perspective on the story. Given the existential emphasis on the unitary quality of lived experience (it is multifaceted, but there is only one stream of experience; Gendlin, 1962, 1997) and the constructivist emphasis on the generative nature of language and “storying,” it could not be otherwise. To argue that I was somehow apart from the story would be to return to a true “essentialist” view of self. As new meaning is experientially generated by carrying forward the felt implicit and is placed into the narrative, the story is certainly changed. Because the I is part of this story, I is also likely to be changed, at least to some extent. Moreover, as Gendlin (1962, 1997) has pointed out, carrying forward results not only in new explicit meanings but also in a changed sense of living in the moment. Thus, the different sense of I and the changes in the felt implicit permit, though they do not neces- sitate, the emergence of new meanings in the next moment. It is equally important to recognize that this conceptualization of self also retains the contribution of social interaction to the development of the self. First, social interaction is, of course, part of everyone’s lived experi- ence out of which meaning is created. Second, as both social construction- ists and critical constructivists have argued, as people live out their stories with others, and as they offer their stories about others as well, people’s stories of self are inevitably shaped by this process. Moreover, given the reciprocality between experience as lived and meaning as articulated, which was discussed earlier, such articulated meanings will inevitably affect a person’s lived experience as well as his or her conscious story of self. Finally, the symbolization of people’s felt experience and the conscious articulation of their self-story must occur in a language, which is inherently a socially shared and shaped phenomenon. The language and, therefore, social processes inevitably constrain and in some ways shape the story of self that people can develop. In all of these ways, social processes are Richert 86 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. inherently important to the conceptualization of self as the process of storying, which is being offered here. Furthermore, the idea of the complexity of self as consisting of many Me s rooted in specific social situations is retained. However, from the perspective being developed here, these social processes are not under- stood to be the sole basis of self. Carrying forward of meaning—an inde- pendent, internal process—is also understood as essential to the process of storying, which is self. It should be clear from the foregoing dicussion, yet it is worth making explicit, that because it is a linguistic product, the narrative that is self is in awareness. This does not mean that people are constantly focally aware of the narrative that is self, but that as a linguistic product it consists of explicit meanings that at one point, at least, were articulated in focal awareness. By contrast, felt experience, by definition, functions on a tacit level, outside of awareness until it is symbolized in some way. Indeed, it is the articulated, linguistic nature of a story and its characters, plot, and inherent thrust into the future through the dramatic tension of the plot that are the character- istics that make self as story something more than a mere list of traits or values. The process of storying—both the experiential and the explicitly lin- guistic, narrative aspects—may go on without explicit awareness of the processes, but the product, the story itself, will necessarily be in awareness at least as the story is told, whether to self or others. If a person brings the process of storying as well as the story itself into focal awareness, then he or she also generates an explicit meaning of I as the narrator—the orga- nizer (and generator) of meanings—that must be incorporated into the overall life story. It is on this vision of I in the self-narrative that a sense of freedom, agency, and choice rests. To elaborate, agency is simply the capacity to take action. Choice implies selection from among some set of possible alternatives. The un- derstanding of self as presented here suggests that this process of selection rests on the carrying forward of felt experience. The alternative that will be selected when a person is functioning well is one that best carries forward a person’s lived sense of being in that situation at that moment, regardless of whether that option rests on new personally generated meanings or existing socially generated ones. Such choosing would appear to be facili- tated by a well developed I within the narrative that is self. The concep- tualization of self as the process of storying developed here helps thera- pists, then, to understand how a person is able to choose freely and move beyond the constraining views of self that can be imposed by culturally dominant narratives. Such choosing is rooted in the experiential process of carrying forward meaning. As an example of the nature and functioning of self as the process of The Self in Narrative Therapy 87 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. storying that is being proposed, I consider here a man who tells the fol- lowing story about his life. I remember being 10 years old when my dad lost his job, and we had to move from the city to a small town where he had found work as a laborer. It was a miserable experience. Both Mom and Dad felt terrible about not being able to provide as well for us kids. And moving into this small town where you were clearly the outsider and “poor” on top of it, the kids at the school really pushed me, and my brother and sister, aside. It was a really hard time for all of us, and with Mom and Dad so preoccupied with their own problems, I couldn’t go to them about what was hap- pening at school. I got in a lot of fights during my late grade school years, acquired a reputation as a scrapper, but it didn’t stand me in very good stead with the teachers. By the time I hit junior high I discovered that basketball was everything in this little burg and decided that I was going to play and play well on the varsity team when I got to high school. I did it too. It took a lot of hard work. I was holding a part-time job and what with keeping up grades and practicing and the games, it was tough. But you should have seen how the other kids changed their tune. I even became cocaptain of the team my senior year. They were a whole lot nicer to me then—not that I ever became real friends with any of them, but I had gotten them to treat me the way I wanted to be treated. I was the first one in my family to complete college. My sister began, and was certainly bright enough to finish, but she goofed off a lot and left after her third semester. It was a big disappointment to the folks. I made up my mind that I was going to finish and to finish with above a 3.0 and that’s exactly what I did. I guess my only regret about my college years is that between all the time I put in studying and working to pay the bills, I didn’t really make any friends. I had some buddies I hung out with, but no one to whom I was really close. I enjoyed being around these people, but I didn’t want them to interfere with what I was doing nor to be in a position to hurt me or make fun of me—so I guess I contributed to the distance that was there. Even from these few brief episodes of this person’s life story, it is possible to discern a major theme: one of achievement, overcoming difficult odds, and control. This theme appears across the various scenarios and thus can be understood as characteristic of the I narrator who coordinates the vari- ous specific Me s. Glimpses of more specific Me s are present in the situ- ationally specific scenarios, such as the star athlete, the good student, the “buddy.” What is not portrayed in this narrative, of course, are the processes of narration, the processes through which the story develops. If, however, this man is considered as he confronts a situation that does not fit readily with his existing narrative self, it is possible to illustrate something of these processes. If this man encounters other people who directly challenge his story of standing slightly apart from and managing others while presenting himself as friendly with them, this constitutes an opportunity, as well as a threatening experience, for him. In the disconfirmation of his self narrative, these other people are, with more or less explicitness and clarity, holding out the possibility of a different story of self, perhaps one based on more Richert 88 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. intimacy and equality and less control. In so doing, they are not merely offering an option as one might offer an apple, but are constructing him as one capable of that manner of relating. This is a central element in a potential change for this man. Yet, whether he moves in that direction and begins to thicken that story line for himself by what he says to and does with these other people will depend not only on the redefinition they are generating, but also on what he finds carries forward his lived experience at that moment. For example, if as he focuses on his felt sense of being in that situation the personal meanings that emerge are senses of gratitude and trepidation, then he might move toward the new narrative being held out and the self-narrative that may develop as these people continue to interact could be one of him as desiring closeness but needing or wanting protection and guidance. If, by contrast, the meanings that best carry for- ward his felt experience at the moment are along the lines of a sense of being invaded and angry at the intrusion, then he might be more likely to explicitly rejec