ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the key to neurosis is not so much repressed sexual or aggressive impulses, as split-off feelings and their relational context. In infancy and childhood modulation leads to integration. It aims the discovery of meanings, the integration of experience into a shared narrative between patient and therapists. Therapy oscillates between the formation of an attachment bond and the developing story of that attachment. Painful losses are neither denied nor allowed to become overwhelming. The importance of a shared narrative is underpinned by the observation that autobiographical competence is a mark of secure attachment. Narrative capacity requires a containing boundary and a sense of continuity across time, a movement from the past, however painful, through the present, toward the future. Splitting arises where no common ground between attached and attachment figure can be found, or where the rupture between the generations is so great that no continuity in time can be established.
