Understanding continuity to recognize discontinuity.

In this paper the author comments on the contribution by António P. Ribeiro and Miguel M. Gonçalves (in this journal) that offer a creative and unique perspective on maintenance and transformation of problematic self-narrative. From here the author contributes to the topic through the exploration of some issues: a) the relation, in the dialogical process of self-narrative construction, between semiotic processes that give voice to the semantic opposition and semiotic processes that give voice to the contradictory; b) the relation between sameness and ipseity in the self-narrative process; c) the role of a pathemic axis of meaning in the generation process of self-narratives. A final reflection is done on narrative as a device of clinical intervention in which the author makes a distinction between methods based on the recognition and extension of variability and methods based on the recognition of permanency so to get to variability.