A model of narrative development: implications for understanding psychopathology and guiding therapy

Story-telling is one of the psyche's basic functions. All of us organize our experience in the form of narratives in order to give meaning to events, make forecasts about how situations will evolve, guide our actions in relationships and make our self-experience coherent. Here we present a theoretical model which starts out from the hypothesis that, when they are created, the narratives we continuously relate to ourselves and others do not have a pre-existing form. We propose a model for understanding the way each organizational level is formed in the mind, and works and interacts with other levels; and what psychological disorders could affect it, ranging from the basic, where there are simple aggregates of mental images, to the more complex, where there are true and proper stories, in which the characters of the internal scenario interact with each other. According to our model, it is possible to hypothesize the existence of: (1) a pre-narrative level, and (2) a proto-narrative level, followed by three extended narrative levels: (3) a procedural unconscious narrative level, (4) a conscious propositional narrative level, and (5) a verbal interactive narrative level. Our hypothesis is based on: (1) a review of various theories from different fields of research; and (2) illustrative clinical material obtained by recording psychotherapy sessions with severely personality-disordered patients.