Storytelling as therapy: survival, resistance, transformation

Storytelling – literary, oral, and spontaneous – exerts profound psychological, social, and existential power. Beyond its aesthetic function, storytelling can be deliberately mobilized for survival, resistance, transformation, healing, and the cultivation of sensitivity to cross-cultural understanding. It links individuals by combining dulce et utile: aesthetic pleasure with pragmatic implication, enabling persuasive forms of narrative therapy through allusion and parable, and fostering individual and collective consensus oriented toward human well being. Story practices evoke memory, archetypal symbols, mythic imagery, survival instincts, personal trauma, and forms of resistance rooted in identity, politics, and history, while illuminating the unconscious. In moments of existential peril, storytelling becomes an essential human act that sustains mental resilience, social solidarity, and cultural memory. Drawing on myth, oral tradition, literature, autofiction, confession, and therapeutic narration, this paper demonstrates how stories persuade, preserve communal identity, and promote personal development. Reading, writing, narrating, and performing diverse forms of narrative therapy – such as myths, folk tales, fairy tales, koans, Zen parables, personal confessions, dream scripts, diaries, memoirs, and other fictions – activates the will toward individuation, evolution, and empathy. Through a comparative analysis of paradigmatic literary cases (One Thousand and One Nights; the myth of Philomela; Boccaccio’s Decameron; Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days; Burhan Sönmez’s Istanbul, Istanbul; Irvin D. Yalom’s therapeutic fiction; Nossrat Peseschkian’s Oriental Stories; and John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing), this paper argues that storytelling is an embodied practice capable of effecting both inner psycho–mental transformation and external social change, fostering resilience at personal and cultural levels. In its aesthetic and therapeutic dimensions, storytelling evokes the fundamental human right to happiness and affirms the necessity of narration – both for oneself and for others.