The Power of Narrative: Self-Knowledge and Self-Narrative

Telling a story changes the way we think about an event and makes us understand it differently. The very power of storytelling lies in this process of "making understanding". We give meaning to what is happening on the basis of what we have understood about what was in the past or what could be in the future. The same is true when we tell our own story: we give different meanings to the events of our own lives in the various accounts we give of them. This process was spotted early on by th...