The Magic of Myth: Storytelling and The Psyche

We’ve always loved good stories. From fairytales to Hollywood blockbusters, human society is almost be unthinkable without them. But are myths and legends just simple entertainments to pass the time? Or do they exert a powerful pull on our minds and in our lives? And are we at risk of losing this, in our contemporary world of mass marketing and homogenisation? Have stories, like sneakers, become branded? Peter Lavelle looks at the psychology behind storytelling, through the work of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and filmmaker George Lucas.

Transcript:
Relevant links and references at the end of the transcript

Natasha Mitchell: Hi there, welcome to All in the Mind, Natasha Mitchell with you thanks for your company. Today the psychology of a good yarn from fairy tales and ancient epic legends to Hollywood blockbusters, human society would almost be unthinkable without stories. But is the tradition of telling stories more than simply social entertainment? Does it appeal to a deeper need in our psyche and are we at risk of losing this in our contemporary world of mass marketing and homogenisation? Have stories, like sneakers, become branded? Earlier this year we explored the genre of the nuclear movie as a vehicle for expressing our collective fears and today we’re picking up on that idea once again that story telling has immense psychological power.

Peter Lavelle is your guide.

Reading: Once upon a time there lived a man and his wife who were very unhappy because they had no children. These good people have a little window at the back of their house which looked onto the most lovely garden full of all manner of beautiful flowers and vegetables.

Reading: When King Luther Pendragon heard news that his queen had given birth to a healthy son his thoughts leapt forward to a mighty kingdom under the red banner of the Pendragon. But great was his rage when he learnt that Merlin, his advisor and sage had claimed the babe as payment for his service and fled with the child into the night. And though the king searched…

Peter O’Connor: Look back in time most early stories, particularly mythologies, really derived their sense from nature, they must have been an attempt by early humans to make sense of the things that were happening around them in their outer world. I think it’s hard to imagine that a part of human nature isn’t to actually seek some sort of sense and order, some sense of constancy in our world which otherwise becomes unworkable if it’s totally unpredictable and unknowable. And stories are a way in which I think we render some sense into our being.

Peter Lavelle: What’s the point of a story? What’s the purpose of a good yarn? Historians and anthropologists argue that they’ve been a way that pre-industrial societies attempt to make sense of the world around then. Why the sun travels round the earth, why crops grow in spring and not in winter or how the earth was created. They’re a way of inducting young men and women into adulthood and teaching them the laws of the tribe.

But for psychotherapists they can mean something much more. They can give us insights into the human psyche. It was in the 1900s that Sigmund Freud and his then student Carl Jung coined the term the unconscious. This, they argued, was a part of our mind below the surface of our conscious mind that was the dumping ground for impulses and desires that consciousness deemed unsuitable for polite society. Forbidden sexual feelings, destructive or violent impulses, bodily instincts and drives were hidden there - or repressed, as Freud called it.

Carl Jung later split the unconscious into two parts – an individual unconscious rather like Freud’s and something he called the collective unconscious which contained universal symbols he called archetypes. Dr Peter O’Connor is a Melbourne based psychologist and author of “Beyond the Mist” a book on Celtic mythology. He runs group therapy sessions for men using dreams and story-telling.

Peter O’Connor: In essence it is that we don’t come into life tabla rasa, a blank sheet, we come in with a history. Just as we come in with a history of our physical being, we come into it with a history of our psychological being and the collective unconscious refers to our experience as a race, not as a particular individual, whereas the personal unconscious refers to our individual history.

And the collective unconscious then represents various, I suppose the simplest way to explain it might be various dispositions to react in certain ways to repetitive situations that humans have dealt with over time. For example loss, death, birth, these sorts of experiences that we have built up particular ways of behaving. And so what Jung particularly was able to articulate, I think, was that in times of major transitions like that, the psyche tends to dip back into history, into collective history, to find ways of dealing with them and hence we produce archetypal symbols. Now one of the, I think, wonderful parts of mythology is that it does actually help us to understand these archetypal symbols in the collective unconscious. For example, so much mythology is to do with the eternal cycle of birth, life and death so that at times of loss for example mythologies that are to do with birth, life and death enable us to begin to comprehend that following any loss is also a birth. I suppose a precise example would be the Greek story of Demeter and Persephone, where Demeter loses her daughter abducted by Hades into the Underworld and then finds and does retrieve her and so the story helps us to see that Persephone represents six months in the Underworld as winter, and six months above the surface as spring and summer.

A way of sort of picturing if you like in an imaginative language, the process that all of life is forever changing and renewing itself, and that loss and death are part of that. And that’s an example I think of how we can use mythology to help us to comprehend what we’re feeling particularly at major points of transition.

Peter Lavelle: Psychotherapist Peter O’Connor. Like many of Carl Jung’s ideas his notion of a collective unconscious is controversial but for others it explains why so many of our stories, myths and fables are universal. The great American anthropologist Joseph Campbell argued that across all cultures myths and legends have dealt with the same universal themes and challenges, regardless of whether they were told by a Navaho Indian, a troubadour in the court of a Celtic King or by Aboriginal elders.

Jung’s work greatly influenced Campbell who today is best known for his major work “The Hero of a Thousand Faces” first published in 1947. In it he distilled all the world’s mythologies into a sort of grand unifying theory. This was the journey of the hero. To him stories were a metaphorical way of expressing how we all face what are challenges in our everyday lives.

Here’s Joseph Campbell in a television interview recorded shortly before his death in 1987.

There is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many, many periods of history. This can be seen also in the simplest initiation ritual, where a child has to give up his childhood and become an adult, has to die, you might say to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a self responsible adult. It’s a fundamental experience that everyone has to undergo. We’re in our childhood for at least 14 years then to get out of that posture of dependency, psychological dependency, into one of psychological self responsibility requires a death and a resurrection and that is the basic motif of the hero journey. Leaving one condition, finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature or other condition.

Jonathan Young: I think they describe what the psychologists call life stage transition moments and these happen to everyone a number of times.

Peter Lavelle: Dr Jonathan Young is a psychologist, writer and lecturer based in Santa Barbara at the Centre for Story and Symbol. He collaborated with Joseph Campbell in the last years of Campbell’s life and was the founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archives and Library.

Jonathan Young: When childhood is over it’s time to enter young adulthood and the transition is wrenching. There is a time when we transit into something like elder-hood, there’s a later time when a person has to cross retirement or something, there are key moments in life when huge changes take place and they tend to be terribly disorientating, even a positive change like finishing a college program or getting married, or moving to a new city, these can be things of great benefit but they are so different that we have to change to come to terms with them and I think the stories help us, they’re little road maps if you will, or guide books to the unfamiliar.

Peter Lavelle: And herein lies the real psychological power of stories. We can think of our lives as Hero’s Journeys writ small. When we experience a story or a myth we are, in a sense, experiencing our own stories. The struggles and the challenges of the hero figure are also our own struggles and challenges that can require the very same heroic courage as the great figures from mythology demonstrated. And in this sense, we follow the same pattern or journey of the hero Joseph Campbell described. Dr Jonathan Young.

Jonathan Young: In Joseph Campbell’s summary, what he called the “Hero’s Journey” he goes into great detail in each part of the process of what exactly will happen, that there is a call, which is an event, usually a very troubling event, a very disastrous or upsetting event that pulls one out of ordinary experience and starts you in the direction of the adventure. For those in stories sometimes war breaks out, or a parent is murdered or something like that. In our lives this is losing your job, or a hideous divorce, or a reversal of one’s fortunes or something and it can’t be resisted, it’s pretty large, pretty compelling. And so you are then tossed into something disorienting, an exotic experience, it can take you to a foreign place but it definitely will take you into unfamiliar feelings and experiences and situations that you will have to cope with. That’s called the threshold passage, where one crosses away from the familiar into the strange. And it’s usually distressing but you don’t have to take it all on alone, you get some help, these are called companions or allies in the journey and some guidance. There are mentoring characters in these stories.

Beyond the mentor there is the tests and trials and temptations, the difficulties that come in the story, there is the dark night of the soul where you lose hope and perhaps have a whole period of despair. What’s really happening there is that your old way of looking at things is kind of falling apart, it’s a very difficult part of the journey. And then the supreme ordeal is essentially coming to terms with your own death, the limits of your ability to control things, so it’s a chaotic, terrifying part of the bottom of the arc. And then, the return journey where the seeker or hero begins finding their way back to a regular life and the way back is quite challenging in its own right. But you do get something for your trouble, Joseph Campbell called it the boon, the reward, sometimes it’s called the elixir because it has healing power. But this is the insight or the wisdom or the talent or the gift that you hold on the way back and have a thing of great value in yourself, and it’s also of value to others so there’s a position of service that tends to come towards the end of the whole thing because you’re trying to share some of what you’ve learned.

Peter Lavelle: Myths achieve much of their power through the rituals and ceremonial settings associated with them. And throughout history, myths have been told in special places and at special times like sacred festivals in sacred groves, caves or grounds and with guidance from experienced elders as the story tellers. Experiencing the ritual was often as important as the story itself. Jonathan Young.

Jonathan Young: There is a profound connection between ritual and myth. In the ancient times any mythic story would have a ritual that went with it and a ritual would always be built directly on myth. One way to enter into this mythic imagination is to participate in ritual. If you took the story of the Buddha for example there would be this moment when he is sitting in the Bodhi Tree, under the tree, and gaining enlightenment and then if you are a practicing Buddhist you would meditate and in some way replicate this although not exactly copying it, but to some degree trying to enter into that moment.

Peter Lavelle: And so we enter into the ritual, into the story. It’s our way of recognising and dealing with the challenges in our own lives. Therapists, especially Jungian therapists take it a step further. They use stories in a therapeutic setting with their patients by working with their patients’ dreams. Like myths and legends dreams, they believe, are also full of universal story images.

Jonathan Young: Carl Jung believed that mythic stories, whether they were creation tales, or legend, or sagas, or fairytales, that these wisdom stories are very dreamlike, that they are condensed perspective from the unconscious, something very much like a dream except that we have come up with them collectively. So the tools that Jungian oriented psychotherapists use to study dreams can be used to ponder the guidance in these stories. Jung also believed that each person has a myth that they’re living in their life and they didn’t make the myth up – there’s a myth going on in each life but we are not the authors. The myths are the authors, they are making up, they are creating us. If you knew what kind of mythic story you were living you could live it well.

Peter Lavelle: Dr Jonathan Young. Psychologist Peter O’Connor agrees that like myths, dreams are also expressions of our unconscious.

Peter O’Connor: There’s a great similarity Peter and I think that’s actually, personally, that’s how I got so interested in myths was actually through my clinical work with dreams. It was originally a British anthropologist in the 30s, Jane Harrison, then I think Joseph Campbell also rephrased this saying which says that myths are the dreams of the people and dreams are the myth of the individual. And that’s the link that they both are imaginative language but dreams tend to be the daily myth that we’re engaging in which every now and then of course overlaps with a major myth. So one has to approach both dreams from my perspective fairytales and myths with an imaginative metaphorical way of thinking rather than a logical way of thinking. They produce images of feelings we have and of course that’s the direct link to fairytales and myths, they also speak in an imaginative language of feelings that we have.

Now mythology and fairytales and of course literature above all else can help us to actually restore ourselves, if I could use that word, or being to identify ah yes, that’s what I feel.

Natasha Mitchell: Psychotherapist Dr Peter O’Connor. And on ABC Radio National you’re listening to All in the Mind coming to you also on Radio Australia and the net. And today, we’re looking into the psychology of storytelling. Peter Lavelle is exploring the psyche through the legends, tales and myths we’ve always shared with each other.

Film Clip from Terminator: A machine like a robot?

Not a robot, a cyborg, a cyborgnetic organism.

No, he was breathing.

Alright listen, the Terminator’s an infiltration unit, part man, part machine, fully armoured, very tough but outside it’s living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood grown for the cyborgs.

Peter Lavelle: We live in the age of the blockbuster special effects movie, the airport novel, the TV soap. These are our modern popular myths. But do these stories fulfil the same role that myths and fairytales used to, of collectively guiding us through the journey of life? Are Tom Clancy, Seinfeld and The Terminator really expressions of the collective unconscious. Psychologist Dr Jonathan Young.

Jonathan Young: I think we’re in a golden age of storytelling and I think that there is great wisdom even in action movies. Stories tend to reflect human experience, stories that are very, very popular often reflect something quite profound about human experience. The fact that we have so many movies, so many more channels or opportunity to see films and dramas and more television, you know cable channels and all of this to choose from, I think has really led to a kind of flowering of the literary imagination.

Peter Lavelle: In the 1980s Hollywood discovered the work of Joseph Campbell thanks to George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars films. Lucas wrote the Star Wars scripts using Joseph Campbell’s classic hero journey that you heard about earlier. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the hero and his epic journey is to defeat an evil intergalactic empire with help from Obi Wan Kenobi, Yoda and a couple of robots. At the climax he faces his nemesis, Darth Vader, a sort of Black Knight of the galaxy. Here’s George Lucas speaking in the documentary Star Wars and the Magic of Myth.

George Lucas: I had always had an interest from the days when I was in college in mythology and how mythologies transfer certain values to the next generation, certain ideas about how we operate, how the society operates, what’s expected of you, how you define your role in a society and what your obligations are to that society and what are the standards that are set. And that’s mythology, that’s what it was, it was a way of one generation telling the next generation this is how you fit and doing it in a story telling way as it has related to the past. And one of the prime issues of mythology was that it was always over the hill, it was always in this mysterious place where anything can happen. And I said well the only place we’ve got left is space.

Jonathan Young: Lucas has been criticised because the Star Wars films, the five of them, essentially follow the same plot line and rework that arc again and again. But that’s nothing to apologise for. The hero’s journey is an eternal pattern that we need to go through many times in our life’s journeys. And he was drawing heavily on Campbell and later he got to know Campbell rather well, he thought George Lucas had really understood the way the pattern worked, what it had to say, particularly the moral decision that each seeker or hero must make as to whether to serve the machine, the values of the machine or whether to serve the values of the heart, the human values and Lucas really presents that clearly.

Peter Lavelle: George Lucas wasn’t the only film maker in Hollywood to be influenced by Joseph Campbell’s ideas. Stephen Spielberg, Jim Henson and George Miller, creator of the Mad Max movies, also used the hero myth model to tell stories on the big screen. Has Hollywood bought the rights to the collective unconscious?

Jonathan Young: Yes, it became very popular in Hollywood then to try to build stories along this model and I think this is kind of marvellous the way this ancient wisdom is sneaking into the studios which are really mainly interested in making money. But if it can serve a human emotional need, the chances that people will buy more tickets to that film tends to go up.

Peter Lavelle: But how healthy is this golden age of storytelling when so many Hollywood movies portray scenes of exploitation and violence? And psychologist Dr Peter O’Connor has another concern.

Peter O’Connor: What I think is more of a worry is the sort of standardisation and homogenisation of myth and film for example that the American culture seems to be indulging in where you’re actually given stories rather than actually encouraged to develop your own stories.

Peter Lavelle: By that you mean the loss of a smaller communities’ stories and its culture simply being swamped by the massive distribution systems of say the Hollywood studios or the big multi national publishers for example?

Peter O’Connor: Yes, and that most of their stories are geared within the economic rationalism to sell not to actually speak to individuals or the soul, they don’t actually speak to so many people. They don’t provide enough variety and differentiation to meet the wide range of needs and feelings that we need to give form to. One of the things you can see is the tremendous success of Harry Potter, this is clearly doing what the old myths would have done as people enjoy the story, the magic, but I do think we have nevertheless become relatively impoverished because we haven’t valued, if you like, the creative lives, and the creative arts as much in our modern world as perhaps was valued in the older times. And we don’t tend to have time now to tell stories and we tend to get the standard stories you know via the televisions etc. One of the things once was said about myths is that they are food for the soul and if you take the soul, you know, from its original Greek word ‘psyche’, that myths are actually ways in which we sustain. We tend to have one predominant story at present and that’s a rather impoverished one that we would call economic rationalism, that it is a mythology, it’s the contemporary mythology, but of course it’s used to explain everything one can imagine from health care to well being, to justify wars, on it goes. Now when you have a mono-myth like this, I think it fails to capture our experience as human beings and the wisdom of the Greeks of course was that they had so many myths and therefore their stories reflect the wide range of human experiences.

Peter Lavelle: So will we continue to tell our stories at all? Peter O’Connor believes we can’t exist without them.

Peter O’Connor: Not to have a story is in fact not to be human, that one’s disconnected from one’s actual being. So we have to in some ways continue to re-mythologise ourselves, that is, we have to continue to stay in touch with our imaginative life and begin to construct if you like and renew the stories that we’ve had of who we are.

Peter Lavelle: Melbourne based psychologist Dr Peter O’Connor. And anthropologist Joseph Campbell would have agreed. Campbell believed that as a society changes, its myths must change with it. And the most compelling myth of the future he argued, is bigger than all of us.

Joseph Campbell: The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it, that’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be.

Natasha Mitchell: A folk hero of sorts himself Joseph Campbell there speaking just before his death in 1987. And your guide today through the myth and magic of storytelling was Dr Peter Lavelle, who by the way also writes for the ABC’s Health Matters website which is at abc.net.au/health.

And you’ll also find information about the show with transcripts and audio on our website. Just go to abc.net.au/rn and click on All in the Mind under the programs list, you’ll find plenty there to tuck into as well as our email address we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks today to sound engineer David Bates and producer Sue Clark. I’m Natasha Mitchell and I look forward to your company again next week.

Dr Peter O’Connor
Melbourne based psychologist, in private practice

Dr Jonathan Young
The Center for Story and Symbol

Star Wars
The Magic of Myth National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution virtual Exhibition

The Center for Story and Symbol

The Joseph Campbell Foundation