At their best, therapeutic plots provide experiments in considering who one might be, even with a disability. But rarely do they offer decisive answers to the questions, “Who am I now?” or “Who will I become?” Their messages are fraught with ambiguity, images in the subjunctive mode (Good and Good 1994; Bruner 1986, 1990; Iser 1974, 1978). Illness trajectories are notoriously uncertain (Becker and Kaufman 1995; Casper and Koenig 1996). Diagnoses may offer some parameters which constrain what therapists, patients and kin may reasonably hope for, but treatment is often an on-going guessing game in which prognoses are revised as the illness is lived out (Good 1995). Bodily uncertainty is compounded by the phenomenological uncertainty which characterizes rehabilitation, often forcing even the reluctantly reflective to ponder the meaning of their lives. Illness can mark an intensely contemplative time, an irrevocable and unmistakable turning point. When illness or injury will be followed by disability, the turning point cannot be avoided.

This chapter takes up in a more explicit and careful way what has been reiterated all along, that therapeutic plots and life plots are irrevocably intertwined. In doing so, it addresses a number of central anthropological assumptions about what makes a self and what narrative has to do with it.

Narrative and the coherent self

Anthropological thought has taken some rather complicated turns in considering the self as narratively configured.