Truth doesn't really matter all that much. Of course, this is not what we were told as children, when we heard all about George Washington and the whole cherry-tree business.
Actually, the above is a very simplistic take on a very complex issue, for the truth does matter, or at least - as Spence (1984) argues, narrative truth matters. Narrative truth is for Spence - and other scholars have made similar distinctions - the "truth" of the stories that we tell ourselves (p. 19). Such truth can be dramatically different from what he refers to as "historical truth", which is the kind of Truth-with-a-capital-T that most of us were taught to respect as children. Historical truth is facts-on-the-ground truth - the sun rises in the east, the earth revolves around the sun, stars go nova at the end of their lives, the universe is cooling down as it expands.
Such historical truth has its place, Spence argues, and not only because it informs the private, narrative truths that we each construct for ourselves. Reality matters: It matters whether or not HIV causes AIDS, after all, because the kind of virus that causes a disease determines the type of anti-viral drugs that we have to use to respond to it. But Spence argues that narrative truths are in many ways more important because they limn for each one of us our personal realities. This is especially true with the realm of psychotherapy, because it is the ways in which we translate our experience into words, into stories, that determines our ability to function and to be happy.
We are the stories that we tell ourselves, tell about ourselves. An obvious example is the problem of eating disorders: Anorexics tell themselves stories about how fat they are as well as stories about how strong they are to take control of their bodies through starvation. The stories that an anorexic tells herself about how fat she is is a narrative truth: It is true because she believes it to be true. The reason th...