Narrative Reconstruction occupies a pivotal position across several registers of depth-psychological and trauma-clinical discourse. At its clinical core, as elaborated by Herman and Courtois, the term designates the therapeutic project of reconstituting a coherent, temporally ordered account of traumatic experience — transforming dissociated, fragmented intrusive material into a memory that can be held within the survivor’s broader autobiographical story. Herman insists that this reconstruction is never a simple retrieval but a painstaking, often prolonged collaborative construction, particularly fraught in survivors of chronic abuse where memorial lacunae are substantial. Courtois extends this into developmental trauma treatment, specifying narrative reconstruction as the goal of trauma memory exposure work with youth: the aim is to place the reconstructed memory within the child’s ‘larger personal story.’ Frank approaches the term from a phenomenological and ethical direction, arguing that illness itself demands a narrative response to interrupted biography; here reconstruction is less a clinical technique than an existential imperative imposed by suffering on the storytelling self. Neimeyer and his constructivist colleagues reframe the concept epistemologically: because narratives are social-linguistic constructions whose validity is pragmatic rather than objective, they can be rewritten when they no longer serve — making reconstruction the central mechanism of grief work and meaning-making after loss. Ricoeur provides the philosophical underpinning, locating narrative identity’s dialectic of sameness and selfhood as the terrain on which any personal reconstruction necessarily operates. Tensions between restitution, chaos, and quest narrative forms (Frank), between explicit and tacit dimensions of meaning (Neimeyer), and between stabilization prerequisites and reconstruction goals (Courtois) animate the concept throughout the corpus.