ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the understanding and contributions by major theorists to the centrality of story in making meaning in psychotherapy. No history of psychotherapy contributions would be complete without mentioning Sigmund Freud. Freud began his medical career in Vienna as a neurologist. Unfortunately for the treatment of trauma, Freud recanted his position on childhood sexual abuse and hysteria. This likely set the understanding of the ubiquity of child abuse and the need for trauma treatment back almost one hundred years. Thus Freud’s contributions to narrative psychotherapy include the importance of listening carefully to the patient’s life stories; seeing story as a template for emotional problems; and understanding that in psychological disorders the same plotline recurs over and over. Psychology has a long history of studying drives and needs and traits and reinforcement schedules and intelligence quotients and other rather arcane and constructed concepts, while ignoring the primacy of narrative that surrounded it.
