The child diagnosis/assessment literature has traditionally emphasized the importance of data collection and integration as a prelude to treatment. The clinician, however, must also be concurrently engaged in a distinct and phenomenologically different task: that of initiating an intersubjective discourse with the child to enhance the unwinding of the narrative account. Because the assessment process is often geared toward the cultivation and synthesis of “data,” historical truths become an important source of validation for clinical hypotheses and sometimes a near-exclusive referent of the assessment process. Failure to consider the importance of the child's narrative, however, will always restrict the flow and content of the intersubjective discourse between child and clinician and inevitably lead to unsatisfactory therapeutic results. Utilizing children's autogenic stories as vehicles for narrative expression is discussed and illustrated through clinical example, and the role of the story—metaphor as an instrument of therapeutic communication is also described.