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Narrative is the Rosetta Stone of the mind. It is the quintessential formation for the foundation of self, thought, self/other, and therefore all other considerations.
It is at once, this simple and this complex: A single thought cannot exist for any length of time in singularity in-and-of-itself alone, without being connected to another thought. This is not an unnecessary compulsion. It is how the mind creates meaning.
The need for the mind to create connection is the genesis and conception of meaning. The connections continue, followed by more thoughts and feelings and the mind develops and deepens a story around the original notion. This is narrative.
While we have many stories in our lives, our self-narrative is our foundational narrative. It is the story by which we determine what all else means. It drives affect, love, likes and dislikes, proclivities, hobbies, salaries, jobs, familial relationships, and even dinner conversations.
The simplest example I can think of to illustrate how self-narrative drives meaning is to consider the notion of a deer. If you love the graceful and generally peaceful animal and find it to be a thing of beauty, you may be an animal lover or nature-loving individual. If you find it to be a very expensive and an invasive pest, you may like nature, but that deer may also be eating every flower you plant. If you define the deer as wild game or venison, you may be a hunter or a chef. If you define the same deer as the most dangerous and deadly animal for humans, you may just live in rural Michigan (because deer crossing the road cause accidents every day in this region).
Our foundational narrative can be apparent to us or partially, mostly or fully hidden from us. Narratives are fully and presently in every thought we have nonetheless. Therefore, the understanding of narrative is necessarily critical to analytic work.
This idea takes nothing away from theories of construct of the mind, the existence and power of transference and countertransf