The power of narrative is the premise of a fairly new branch of medicine called narrative psychology. Proposed independently in the 1980s by psychologists Theodore Sarbin, Jerome Bruner, and Dan McAdams, it’s a school of thought concerned with how people make meaning through the construction, telling, and recounting of stories. If neuroscience and some branches of psychology think of the mind as a container, a machine, or something akin to a computer’s CPU, narrative psychology sees the mind as the “great narrator.”
