ABSTRACT
Narratives give development a sense of temporality, continuity, permutation, and cohesion. Through narrative, experiences, especially of the sense of self, take on the quality that, like Paris, the more it changes, the more it is the same. Discovering and creating a coherent narrative truth about the individual's lived experience facilitates therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. This chapter identifies a series of mini-stories that they hope build to a broad conclusion—the significance of narrative in early life. It describes what the authors mean by meaning and compare the traditional concept of representation with what it mean by narrative. Narratives have an integral relationship with the individual's sense of meaning whether moment to moment or over widely varied periods of time. The chapter expands the range of symbolization from familiar symbolic systems—imagistic, verbal, mathematical, and musical—to include modes of encoding sensorimotor experience (movement, body sensation). It describes each original or subsequent meaningful lived experience as involving components of perception, cognition, memory, and affect.
