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 narrative 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: