Introduction: Narrative in psychotherapy: The emerging metaphor

For the last decade a new metaphor has been progressively, but securely, penetrating the domains of academic and professional psychology. The "narrative" metaphor began to be widely diffused in books, journal articles, and conference papers. Even though some ancient roots of the narrative metaphor can be traced back (c.f., Polkinghorne, 1988), we are indebted to Theodore Sarbin (1986) for introducing narra- tive as the alternative "root metaphor" for psychology. It is interesting to note that Sarbin acknowledged the centrality of narrative on both his academic and clinical life: In my teaching of abnormal psychology, I had found it more useful to report on and analyze life histories, that is, stories about concrete individuals, than to overview the experiments done on nameless, faceless subjects, the results of which were expressed as probabilities. Further, in my role as clinician, I could not carry out my work unless I located the clients and their significant others in a narrative plot (p. IX-X). Sarbin's statement introduces two themes that are going to be central in the devel- opment of the narrative metaphor: narrative as a way of understanding human experience and narrative as a clinical tool. After decades of separation, some academics and practi- tioners are finally finding a common metaphor for understanding and promoting human