Experienced Life and Narrated Life Story: Gestalt and Structure of Biographical Self-Presentations

A new edition of sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal’s classic 1995 work on phenomenology and Gestalt theory.

How do people narrate events in their life stories and the history of their family or families? How are narratives and experiences in the present related to experiences and narratives in the past? In this foundational work by sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal, he answers these questions with a theoretical and empirical study of the interconnections between remembering, experiencing, and presenting what was experienced at different points of the life course and of the associated collective histories. He also discusses rules for conducting interviews that support processes of remembering and for carrying out an analysis that does justice to this dialectic.

This edition contains a new introduction and a new chapter that explores the later expansion of Rosenthal’s approach to sociological biographical research, reflecting the inspiration she took from the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. With its analysis of the complex relationships between experiencing, remembering, and presenting, Experienced Life and Narrated Life Story makes an important contribution to the theoretical foundations of biographical research.
 

Gabriele Rosenthal is a sociologist and professor emerita of qualitative methodology at the Institute of Methods and Methodological Principles in the Social Sciences at the University of Göttingen in Germany.