I like this passage a lot. Its from an essay called “The stories we live by: personal myths guide daily life” by Sam Keen.

The entire legacy and burden of cultural and familial myth come to rest, ultimately, on the individual. Each person is a repository of many stories, old and new. But what Santayana said about cultures is equally true for individuals: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Unless we try to become conscious of our personal myths, we are in danger of being dominated by them. Neurosis, for example, can be viewed as an ofttold story we repeat to ourselves and others (”Well, I’m just not the kind of person who can….” “I wouldn’t think of ….”). Personal myths become constricting and boring unless they’re examined and revised from time to time. We need to reinvent ourselves continually, weaving new themes into our life narratives, remembering our past, revising our future, reauthorizing the myth by which we live.

When Freud invented the “talking cure,” he discovered the relation between forgetting and disease, remembering and health, and created a new form of theater. The good doctor Freud, under the spell of the myth of “science,” would never admit that psychotherapy is a species of storytelling, one closer to theater, the novel and the dramatic arts than to science or medicine. Nevertheless, in psychotherapy a troubled person hires a private theater and an audience of one (or lately, a group) to recollect and re-enact a lifetime of forbidden and untold stories. One day, after many quite ordinary 50-minute hours, magic may happen: Suddenly in the middle of telling the life story through, backwards (regressing into the archaic), the spell of the past is broken and the individual feels and sees something new.

The rest of the article’s not bad either, but that little bit there is rad.