ABSTRACT
Essentially psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a conversation. In many ways the conversation of psychotherapy is more like story-telling and story-listening than conversation as such. This story-telling and story-listening conversation must also be understood to include a number of somewhat unique features. In large part psychotherapy is about discovering the larger depths and meanings of the words in which we tell our stories. This means finding still other words through which to narrate our experiences. When we say that psychotherapy is a form of story-telling, then, we mean that it both proceeds through and is concerned with all those life stories that we are telling and living all the time and in many different ways. Story-Telling purpose is not so much to communicate something to someone else. Rather, its purpose is to produce on the part of the story-teller a certain relationship to her own story–a relationship of introspection, reflection and self-understanding.
