‘The difference between men and animals is that men tell stories.’
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At the beginning of this book I quoted that haunting little poem by Robert Frost
‘We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.’
Without in any way wishing to detract from the genius of our great storytellers, if there is one thing we have seen emerging from the past few hundred pages it is the extent to which the stories told by even the greatest of them are not their own. Their skill lies in the power with which they manage to find new outward clothing in which to dress up a theme which is already latent, not only in their own minds but in those of their audience. What we have seen in the first three sections of the book is how stories take shape in the human imagination round certain archetypal patterns and images which are the common property of mankind. Furthermore, at the very deepest level, the essence of the message they are putting across is always the same.
What this points to is something the implications of which are truly awesome. This is the extent to which stories emerge from some place in the human mind which functions autonomously, independent of any storyteller’s conscious control. This is not so startling an idea as it might seem, because we are all in a sense familiar with it in the way in which we experience dreams. By definition, the sequences of imagery which make up our dreams are shaped and presented to our conscious awareness (even though we are asleep) by another part of the brain of which we are wholly unconscious. It is true that dreams are more obviously than stories the products of the dreamer’s own personal unconscious (although they can often take on a more universal, archetypal dimension); and to compose a story requires a collaboration between the conscious and unconscious levels of the storyteller’s mind which cannot apply when we dream. But the real key to understanding stories lies in seeing how they are ultimately rooted in a level of the unconscious which is collective to all humanity; and how the ‘Secret’ which ‘sits in the middle’, giving them their underlying shape and purpose, is always trying to put over the same fundamental point.
As we come to this final part of the book we can at last confront what are perhaps the most interesting questions of all. Why has the evolutionary process developed in us this ability and need to imagine stories? What is its purpose? How does the imaginary world conjured up by storytelling relate to what we call ‘real life’?
An appropriate starting point from which to answer these questions lies in two specialised types of story we now look at for the first time.
One of the deepest human needs met by our faculty for imagining stories is our desire for an explanatory and descriptive picture of how the world began and how we came to be in it. There is no culture in the world which does not possess at least one great story to account for how the world came into being, and all such stories have certain things in common. But, broadly speaking, they subdivide into three main categories.
The simplest version is that derived from Jewish mythology and set out at the beginning of the book of Genesis. This is untypical because it begins with a conscious power, ‘God’, who masterminds the whole process of creation in a highly systematic and orderly fashion. He is there before everything else, himself alone. He then creates a duality, heaven and earth. Covered in darkness, the earth is ‘without form and void’. The ‘Spirit of God’ then ‘moves upon the face of the waters’ and calls Light into being (preceding any source of physical light, such as the sun). This highly significant event (never more dramatically portrayed than by the C Major explosion of sound at the start of Haydn’s Creation) creates a second duality, between light and dark. God then creates further dualities, between the earth and the sky, land and sea. Finally he proceeds to the orderly creation of the sun, the moon and the stars, followed by all the specific types of living creature which inhabit the earth: plants, fish, reptiles, mammals, birds, culminating in man. Each new species when it is created appears fully-formed. The entire creation is described as having been brought about in six days, and the whole thing has been unrolled as neatly as checking off a shopping list.
Only because in Western culture we are so familiar with this version are we not more generally aware just how untypical it is. The second version, found in almost every other Creation myth in the world, gives the impression of a process infinitely more laborious, mysterious and long drawn-out. There may be some Great Spirit or cosmic mind behind it all, and almost all the different versions begin with an image of dark and formless chaos. But what marks off all these other cosmogonic or Creation myths from the Judaeo-Christian version, is that the emergence of our recognisable world takes place by what we would call an ‘evolutionary’ process, as each new component develops out of what came before. In a typical myth of the south Pacific, for instance, found among the Ngaitahu people of New Zealand, the original void, without light, heat, sound, form or movement, is ‘Po’. We then hear how:
‘Po begat Light, who begat Daylight, who begat enduring Light, who begat Without-possession, who begat Unpleasant, who begat Wobbly, who begat No-Parents, who begat Damp, who married Huge Light and begat Raki, the Sky.’1
Another variation on this type of myth includes those which feature the emergence of a male and a female being, the ‘world parents’. In the Norse version creation begins with the vast, cloudy realm of Niflheim. Here in darkness immense primordial beings eventually heave into view: first a male giant Ymir, who emerges from ice, then a female being, Audumla, the ‘world cow’. It is eventually from them that all other beings emerge, including gods, humans and animals.
Perhaps the most widespread version of this type of story, however, found in different cultures all over the world, is that which begins with the image of a single created object set in the primeval void. This ‘World Egg’ contains within itself the potential for all the diversity that is to come. Variations on this theme have been found everywhere from ancient Egypt to the Pacific islands, from Finland to Japan, from Hindu and Buddhist India to the Orphic mysteries of classical Greece. The ‘Egg’ then differentiates out of itself, producing a sequence of new entities, often not very clearly defined, which only gradually become such basic splittings into duality as earth and sky, dry land and sea. Almost invariably a crucial event is the coming of Light, creating the polarity of light and dark (which again precedes the arrival of specific sources of light, such as sun and moon). Gradually the details of the creation emerge, as in the appearance of specific creatures. What is important is that each of these evolves from what had come before it.
The third version, probably the most familiar to us today, is that which has been developed in our modern world over the past two centuries. But it is still ‘telling a story’, and in this sense we can look at it just as we would look at any other type of story.
The ‘Big Bang’ theory of the creation of the universe suggests that in the beginning there was an agglomeration of hydrogen atoms, so tightly compressed together that it was only millimetres across and of almost infinite mass. This constituted, as it were, a ‘Universal Egg’, which contained the potential for all that was to follow. At a certain point, somewhere around 15 billion years ago, this ‘Egg’ exploded, with such force that electrons jumped from one nucleus to another, creating the atoms of all the other elements. These were the atoms which still constitute the physical universe and everything in it, including ourselves. Gradually, as matter exploded outwards from the original ‘Egg’ at colossal speed, the universe took on a recognisable shape. Billions of galaxies were formed, trillions of stars, innumerable planets, including our own.2 And as our attention now focuses on one tiny planet, Earth, we see various basic dualities emerging, such as the splitting of gaseous atmosphere from the earth’s surface, land from sea.
Then the most startling development of all takes place, the coming not of Light but Life. The first amino-acids are formed, the first self-replicating molecules emerge: and the story of life then becomes rather like a Rags to Riches story, or rather a succession of them, each evolving out of the last. Our hero is originally a little one-celled creature who reveals the potential to multiply and become a multi-celled creature. Later he is a water creature who reveals the potential to rise from a ‘lower’ state to a ‘higher’, by becoming a land creature. At each stage the hero is revealing a ‘higher Self’ emerging from within his previous, more limited ‘inferior Self’. And of course at each stage he is getting nearer to something we can recognise as ourselves.
There is one particularly dramatic episode in the story, in the Mesozoic, when we see a duality emerging between ‘the Monster’, the slow-witted, cold-blooded dinosaurs, and a new hero, the first little warm-blooded mammals, who rush about like so many Davids in the presence of Goliath: outwardly, physically so much less impressive, but like little David endowed with vastly superior brain-power and ultimately destined to succeed to the kingdom, when the monsters of this mythology, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, its Tyrant King, have been mysteriously overthrown.
Finally comes the moment when another hero emerges from the shadow of shambling apes and other mammalian monsters: the first hominids who, after a time of struggling with mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and other ‘dark’ figures of our immediate prehistory, turn unto the ultimate hero of the whole story, Homo sapiens, ourselves.
Scarcely has the hero emerged from the shadows into his full glorious identity, however, than we find ourselves being drawn into another plot to explain why we have not yet reached the full happy ending.
Although every culture in the world has its myths to explain the creation of the universe, there is a second very important type of story which is only found much more rarely. This is the myth which tells how, in the earliest stages of man’s arrival in the world, an extraordinary event took place which was to separate him from the rest of creation as being fundamentally different from any other animal.
Again, the version of this story of the ‘Fall of Man’ with which we are most familiar is that recounted in the book of Genesis. This shows us the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve, originally living in a garden called ‘Paradise’ (from the old Persian ‘pardis’, ‘a garden’), in a state of happy and unbroken unity with nature. Everything necessary for their life is available to them. All is well, until they succumb to the temptation of the Serpent and eat of the fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’. At this point, several specific things happen to them, transforming their lives. In attaining this mysterious ‘knowledge’, they realise that what has happened to them is partly a blessing and partly a curse. They are expelled from Paradise. They become aware of a distinction between ‘Good and Evil’. They are now superior to all other forms of life, but their existence is filled with new troubles. They have become self-conscious; they are ashamed of their nakedness, and conceal their reproductive organs. Finally they know, for the first time, they are going to die.
Another familiar version of this story is that contained in the complex of Greek myths centred on the figures of Prometheus (‘forethought’); his brother Epimetheus (‘afterthought’); and the latter’s wife Pandora (‘giver of all things’). Pandora is given by the gods a mysterious vessel, which she is told on no account to open, just as Eve is told not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. She does so and out into the human world pour all sorts of troubles, such as envy, lust, insanity, hatred, lying and war. Prometheus steals from the gods on Olympus the priceless gift of fire, previously the prerogative of the gods alone. For this he is sentenced to a life of endless suffering, as the price of the prize he has won: tied in perpetuity to a great mountain, where every day his liver, supposedly the seat of human contentment, is gnawed by an eagle.
These two myths from the dawn of civilisation represent the most sophisticated attempts by pre-scientific man to account for the fundamental way in which Homo sapiens differs from every other species on earth. All other animals live out their lives entirely by instinct. They can only act as they have been genetically programmed to act, by nature. They thus live in a state of complete unity with nature. What marks out mankind from all other species is that, somewhere far back in prehistory, our ancestors began to develop an entirely new level of consciousness which allowed them to step outside that natural frame. For the first time in the history of life on this earth, there was one species which no longer lived entirely in accordance with the dictates of instinct in everything it did. At first almost imperceptibly, then more and more, it began to develop the capacity to choose how to do things differently: as in the way it learned how to use sticks and stones to catch the animals it hunted for its food; to strip off their skins to provide warm clothing; to use fire to make their meat more edible, and language in which to converse.
But along with this new level of consciousness came something else that was entirely new. Each member of this new species now had a sense of its own separate, individual existence. It had what we call an ego. And in this respect it was totally different from any other creature. It is meaningless to speak of an egocentric fish or bee or elephant. But Homo sapiens, both individually and collectively, has the capacity to act selfishly. And it is this which has presented him with a problem which is unique in the animal kingdom.
All this is what these stories of the ‘Fall’ are unconsciously designed to symbolise. When Adam and Eve arrive in Paradise they are in a state of ‘innocence’, reflecting that state of nature where every animal lives in unthinking obedience to instinct all its life long. In this sense, like any other animals, they are not responsible for their actions, But their expulsion from the garden marks their emergence from this state of nature. It is their new ability to choose between one form of behaviour and another which lies at the root of their sense of a distinction between good and evil. It is their ability to re-order the terms of their relationship with the rest of nature which gives them superiority over all other forms of life. It is this peculiar form of consciousness, standing apart from nature, which makes the human race self-conscious, giving them the sense that they must hide away parts of their body from general view. And it is this sense of their own finite, individual existence which tells each human being that one day its life must come to an end: which is why Adam and Eve know for the first time they will eventually have to die.
The Greek version of the story adds further elements to the message. The names of the two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, ‘forethought’ and ‘afterthought’, reflect another extraordinarily important consequence of the emergence of this new form of consciousness. This is that it creates the power of imagination: the ability to create mental images of that which is not present to the physical senses. An animal which lives entirely by instinct can live only in the moment, at one point of time. Although many other species can learn from experience, only human beings can rise above the present moment altogether, to cast their mind’s eye forward and back in time: to imagine events which have not yet happened or to summon up memories of that which happened in the past.
But the most significant consequence of all is that symbolised in what happens when Pandora defies the instruction not to open her mysterious sealed ‘vase’ or vessel. This is not just another image for humanity breaking loose from the confines of nature. It unleashes into the world a range of wholly new troubles, from envy and lust to hatred and war. And all these are by-products of the emergence of the human ego. It is precisely this sense of having a separate ego-centred existence which cuts human beings off from each other, potentially setting them at odds with each other and with nature itself, to a degree which marks them out from any other species. When Prometheus steals ‘fire’ from the gods, what he is really stealing is that divine spark of consciousness which distinguishes humanity from all those other forms of life which live in unconscious thrall to instinct. Yet for all the new freedom this gives, there is a terrible price to be paid, symbolised in the image of Prometheus stretched out in agony on that Caucasian rock, having his liver eaten away every day by the insatiable eagle. It is the state of perpetual nagging discontent which must follow from that most crucial of all the new faculties that ego-consciouness brings with it: the ability to imagine that things might be different from what they are.
The term ‘consciousness’ is often used too loosely, as if only man is conscious and all other forms of life live wholly unconsciously. All animals of course possess consciousness to some degree, right down to the humblest amoeba which shows consciousness of the particle of food it tracks down to eat. Higher up the evolutionary ladder, the degree of conscious intelligence shown by, say, dolphins or chimpanzees is enormous. Similarly, the higher we look up the evolutionary ladder, the more we see animals taking on their own individual personality, so that the individual members of a troop of chimpanzees are much more clearly differentiated from each other than, say, a shoal of herrings. Where the distinction lies is in the degree to which the conscious part of any animal’s mind, the foreground from which it is perceiving and making sense of the world, remains automatically in harmony with that much larger part of its mind which operates below the level of conscious awareness, and which is governed by all the framework of instinct. In this respect, even the animal species which have the greatest degree of consciousness still operate entirely instinctively; because they do so in such a way that the unconscious and conscious parts of their minds remain wholly integrated and continue to function in perfect accord with each other.
But if the way an animal spends its life, organises its social system and pairs off to reproduce its kind is all dictated by instinct, then, in the broadest sense, the same is true for Homo sapiens. The history of mankind shows that he has formed societies, propagated his kind, preserved the chain of life from generation to generation, just like any other species. However, in human societies as in no other, an element of instability has crept in. Human societies are not governed by an unchanging framework of order. They are in perpetual flux. Men do not obtain their food, build their dwellings, order their relationship with the rest of nature according to strict unchanging patterns and laws. They have the power to make choices. The patterns governing their lives change. Above all, every component part of their society, whether it be each individual human being making it up or each collective group within it, each family, community, class, generation, nation and race, becomes conscious of its own identity, separate from the rest.
To understand more clearly how this works requires more a precise definition of just where the difference between men and animals lies. Every animal has what may broadly be described as two complementary sets of instincts. On one hand each individual animal has its physical instincts, such as its need to eat, drink, breathe and sleep, its urge for sexual release. Because these relate only to itself, like the urge to preserve its own life, they can be described as its ‘ego’ instincts. On the other hand, providing the controlling framework for its existence, are its ‘ordering’ instincts. These are the genetically coded instructions which enable the individual animal in every way to relate to the world around it. They tell it how to obtain its food, how to form social groups for self-protection, how to pair off with partners to reproduce, how to tend its young until they themselves are ready to mate, and so forth. From the marriage of these two complementary sets of instincts we may conclude that the overriding purpose in any form of life is not so much to survive individually as to preserve its own species. And in the animal kingdom, these two forms of instinct are inseparably integrated. But it is here that in human beings a partial separation has arisen. Their individual physical instincts remain just as automatic as those of the animals. But the controlling framework of their ordering instincts has in some way broken adrift. It is in this separation that the unique element of disintegration in human nature is to be found.
In terms of our physical needs we are just as instinctive as any other creature. The difference lies in how we seek to fulfil those needs. When a lion feels hungry, it knows only one way to satisfy that urge, which is to identify some suitable prey, track it down and kill it. The whole hunting process, from the original desire for food to the method whereby it is obtained, continues to be governed by instinct at every step. When human beings need to satisfy their hunger, so far have they emerged from the state of nature that they have developed a whole range of different ways to obtain their food, from planting seeds in the ground and waiting until they ripen into wheat to visiting a supermarket to buy a chicken frozen in a plastic bag. When a blackbird feels the urge to build a nest to shelter its young, the process is so instinctively driven that all blackbirds’ nests look much the same, constructed to the same model. When men build a shelter to protect them from the elements, the results may be a mud hut or a 30-storey tower block, an igloo or the Palace of Versailles.
The difference between men and animals thus lies not in our physical instincts but in all the ways we order our relationship to the world outside us. When it comes to forming social organisations, animals have no choice. The way they relate to each other to promote their common purpose, whether in an ant colony or a herd of elephants, must always follow the same model. When human beings form communities, societies, tribes or nations, the way these are structured becomes infinitely more flexible. Their social groupings can take on a bewildering variety of forms, from a totalitarian dictatorship to a local golf club. It is true that with animal species at the higher end of the evolutionary scale, such as baboons or lions or even chickens, there may be a continual struggle between individuals to establish dominance within the group. But the patterns of this rivalry, and the general form of the social structure in which it takes place, remain strictly dictated by instinct, serving the survival of the group. Similarly, when birds of the same species compete for territory, they may display ritualised aggression towards each other; but at the end of the process, one robin’s territory invariably turns out to be much the same size as the next. All this show of competition has determined, in strict accordance with genetic instructions, is how each bird may end up controlling a patch of land just large enough to supply the needs of its family. But when human beings divide up their living space, one family may end up owning a million acres while another has no more than the corner of a room in an overcrowded slum. Instinct no longer plays a part in dictating the pattern of such arrangements, because human behaviour has, in this respect, broken free from the genetic mould.
But of course this breaking adrift is far from total. And here is the crux of the matter. For on one level, and with what must, on the historical evidence of their survival alone, be regarded as the core of their identity, human beings attempt to adhere to their basic instinctive pattern as if no separation from nature had taken place. At this level human beings have always behaved just like any other animal, as if the supreme purpose of their existence is to carry on the chain of life. Their overriding instinct is to reproduce their species, to which end they form mutually supportive social communities, within which males and females of each new generation have the security to pair off to form new families, to mate and then to nurture their children, until they too grow up to the point where they are ready to reproduce in turn. All this is structured into the unconscious of human beings just as instinctively as it is programmed into any other animal.
But then there intrudes that other component in their psychic make-up which is continually urging them away from this unity of purpose. It is this which explains why, to a degree not remotely experienced by any other animals, we see how human beings, individually and collectively, fall prey to every kind of disintegrative impulse: greed, envy, lust, bad temper, hatred, cruelty, violence, the breaking up of families, loneliness, depression, insanity, crime, social injustice, political divisions, revolutions, wars; in short, all those peculiarly human problems which, as the Greek myth had it, were released into the world by the opening of Pandora’s ‘box’. And all these in one way or another follow from the unique power of ego-consciousness to separate human beings from each other and from nature, and from the breaking down of that natural state of integration between their ego and their deeper unconscious.
Between these two conflicting forces in their psyche, human beings live their lives in a state of constant tension. At the deepest level there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity between the two parts of their psyche: to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves. But to do this they have to make a continual, conscious effort. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations of human consciousness have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.
It is remarkable how many of the forms of behaviour which distinguish human beings from all other animals consist of creating a consciously-contrived framework for some activity which in the life of every other species is wholly instinctive.
An obvious example is the conscious effort human beings have to make to organise themselves into social groups. The way animals group together is governed entirely by instinct. Every baboon troop or ant colony is hierarchically structured according to the basic model of the species, with a dominant male or queen at its head. Each member of the group is instinctively aware of its role as an integral part of a collective organism much greater than itself, because it has not got the individual consciousness to imagine otherwise. And to a great extent the human counterpart to this is also instinctive. All human beings belong to families, communities, tribes or nations which provide them with a central part of their sense of identity. The structure of their social groups is naturally hierarchical, centred on a leader-figure cast more or less successfully in the archetypal role of ‘Father’, ‘Mother’ or ‘Son-Hero’. But beyond that instinctive core which Homo sapiens shares in common with other animals, each human grouping develops its own variations on the basic theme: its own individual forms of organisation, hierarchy and leadership. And to preserve the order of the group against all the disruptive tendencies arising from egotism, it becomes necessary by conscious effort to create elaborate codes of social behaviour, with a framework of laws and punishments to enforce them.
Again, as an individual animal matures through its life, it develops through each stage quite naturally. Only human societies have had to evolve a conscious framework for this process, from the formal structures of a child’s education to the rites and ceremonies which attend each new step along the way, such as those marking birth, initiation into adulthood, marriage, and finally death. The underlying purpose of all these rituals is to bring the conscious life of human beings, taken up with all the trivial distractions of the ego, back into harmony with that instinctive, unconscious core which is rooted in the totality of life: reconnecting them with a sense of something deeper and more universal than just their own individual existence.
The need to resolve this psychic split gives rise to other distinctive features of human behaviour for which the animal kingdom offers no real parallels. One conspicuous means whereby human beings sublimate their tendency to egocentricity is through their love of games and sport. Not only does the rivalry between teams and individuals provide a socially acceptable channel for competitive impulses which might otherwise become socially disruptive. By disciplining physical or mental activity within a strict framework of rules, the participants in a game or sport become subordinated to something higher than themselves. A psychological model for all sporting activity is the spiritual discipline of Zen archery, in which the archer’s purpose is so to eliminate the distortions arising from his own ego that the arrow naturally flies to its target. Whenever a game is played well it produces those moments when body and mind come into such instinctive co-ordination that the players seem to have been lifted above themselves. This was why, until it became corrupted, the original Olympic Games were one of the central religious ceremonies of the ancient Greek world. The skill of the competitors expressed an ideal of perfection which elevated not only the athletes themselves but all those who watched them. Something of the same sense of transcendence, although it is similarly open to corruption by the ego, accounts for the extraordinary glamour which surrounds sport in our modern world.
An even more significant instance of how human beings express this urge to transcend the limitations of their ego-existence is through every kind of artistic expression. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order. From music to painting, from architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution. Any work of art thus seeks to create a marriage between those complementary aspects of the psyche we see as masculine and feminine. Analyse the appeal of a Beethoven symphony and we see how it is made up of that familiar fourfold combination of strength and mind, heart and soul. The music commands our attention by its masculine power. It appeals to our intellect by the formal subtleties of its structure. It moves us by its feminine grace and delicacy, its flowing life, its appeal to our feelings. It elevates us by evoking something beyond ourselves, a sense of perfect totality. Like all great art it thus harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.
Any work of art can be analysed along similar lines, even if only in terms of how it may fall short of such perfect balance. Whenever we sense any artistic creation to be in some way deficient, this is either because it somehow lacks life or because it is inadequately organised, or both. Any work of art which succeeds, however, can make us feel mysteriously more alive, by connecting us with the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego. Such is what the artistic impulse in mankind is all about. But no device for re-establishing that sense of unity with our inner life is more ingenious than one coded into us by the process of evolution itself: our ability to conjure up inside our heads those patterns of imaginary events we call stories.3
The evolution of life on this planet has produced countless miracles, from the complex structure of the eye to the even greater complexities of the human brain. But none is more remarkable than this ability of human beings to see organised sequences of pictures in their heads. Even more remarkable, however, is the underlying purpose for which this faculty has evolved.
The real significance of our capacity to imagine stories, as we have seen, lies in the extent to which they emerge from some part of the mind which is beyond the storyteller’s conscious awareness. To a great degree stories are thus the product of a controlling power which is centred in the unconscious. The very fact that they follow such identifiable patterns and are shaped by such consistent rules indicates that the unconscious is thus using them for a purpose: to convey to the conscious level of our mind a particular picture of human nature and how it works.
We are of course familiar with the idea that some part of our unconscious has the autonomous power to transmit messages to our consciousness, because it was this which for Freud and Jung lay at the heart of their theorising about why we dream. Our dreams, they suggested, can reveal to us much of what is going on in our psyche below the threshold of consciousness. Nevertheless, it is curious how much of the pioneering work of these two psychoanalysts in opening up our understanding of the unconscious was centred on their study of dreams, without their recognising just how much more systematic a picture of its workings can be derived from analysing the process whereby we imagine stories.
Jung, however, went much further in this direction than Freud, above all in seeing how much of our conscious existence is shaped by archetypes: those shadowy elemental structures built into our unconscious which condition so much of our emotional and behavioural response to the world without our being aware of it. This, his central contribution to our understanding of the unconscious, was one of the greatest intuitive discoveries of the twentieth century, ranking alongside those of Einstein and other nuclear physicists, or Watson and Crick’s double helix.
The point about the archetypes is that they constitute a crucial legacy from that process whereby human consciousness split off from our unconscious obedience to instinct. The chief archetypes – Mother, Father, animus and anima, Child – represent all the most basic roles that human beings can be called on to play in that central instinctive process whereby the life of the species is continued, when this is acted out in accordance with the instinctive pattern. But in addition each archetype is two-sided. It contains not only a positive image of how that role should be carried out selflessly in accordance with instinct, but also its negative aspect, reflecting how the intervention of the ego may prevent it being carried out properly.
We are all programmed, for instance, with the set of archetypal impulses surrounding the most basic relationship in all our lives, that with ‘Mother’. When a child is born into the world, it is the ‘Mother’ archetype programmed into its unconscious which leads it instinctively to bond with one single mother-figure (who may not even be biologically its actual mother). Similarly it is the ‘Mother’ archetype which is activated in a woman as she prepares to give birth to her child, arousing all those loving, protective, practical, selfless maternal instincts which we see in any mother animal in nature. When we see the image of a mother presented in a picture or a story, we can immediately respond to the archetype it represents, just as we can when we recognise that she is a ‘Dark Mother’. In this case the ego has intervened, and her role has become not to promote the child’s development but in some way to stifle it and hold it back.
Likewise we instinctively respond to the archetype of ‘Father’ (as in the image of Father Christmas), recognising that his role is to be outwardly strong and masculine, but inwardly open to the feminine, as someone kindly, protective and understanding of those under his care. We can see the ‘Father’ archetype personified in any older man who is in a position of authority; except that again we may see him as the egocentric ‘Dark Father’ when, lacking the softer feminine values, he has become a heartless Tyrant. If his deficiency is the other way, in that he lacks masculinity, he shows himself as an immature puer aeternus, weak and irresponsible.
For a man no archetype is more powerful than that of the anima, that autonomous element in his psyche embodying the qualities of the feminine. His relationship with the anima is that which determines his responses to the opposite sex, and much else besides. For a woman the equivalent is her relationship to the animus, representing the masculine element in her psyche. Again this determines not just her response to men but also the entire internal balance of her personality.
As an expression of what is the biological goal of the whole instinctive process, we see the power of our response to the archetype of the ‘Child’. This arouses in us all those selfless emotions which can be triggered off not only by our own offspring, but by the young of almost any kind.
As an expression of our wish to reintegrate our divided nature, however, no archetype plays a more crucially important role in human psychology than that of the Self. It is this which represents the sense of totality we have lost through our emergence from the state of unconscious unity with creation. It is this archetype which encompasses all the others; which we see at work in the impulse of a story (or any work of art) to come to a perfect resolution; and which governs all human behaviour when, in ways large and small, we sense that our actions are springing from another ‘centre’ in our personality beyond that of our own ego.
All these archetypal powers in the human psyche were identified by Jung, from his studies of dreams and myths. What he was thus able to show was how the pictures we see in our heads when we dream represent in symbolic form the archetypal elements in our unconscious, holding up a unique mirror to our inner state. But what even he failed fully to appreciate was just how profoundly this also applies to the whole of the process whereby we imagine stories. In fact the archetypal patterns which shape stories provide us with a much more structured picture of the components of the human unconscious than we can derive from dreams. They show us how all the archetypes fit together as part of a dynamic process. And when we learn how to decipher their significance, we begin to see we how it uses stories, ultimately, to put over one central message, the essence of which can be summarised as follows:
One of the first things we all learn to recognise about the characters we see in stories is that familiar distinction between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, heroes and villains. The reason for this division is that it presents to us in symbolic form the split caused in human nature by the separation of ego-consciousness from the selfless unconscious. The chief device the unconscious uses to symbolise this split is by representing it in terms of that central conflict between ‘dark’ and ‘light’.
The ‘dark power’ in stories, as we have seen, represents the power of the ego, most starkly personified in the archetype of the ‘monster’; which is like a symbolic caricature of human nature when deformed by egotism from the state of wholeness it would possess if it was still at one with nature. Hence the way in which the ‘monster’ is so often seen as a combination of animal and human characteristics. Its animal element represents its unconscious instinctive self. In the greed, cruelty and cunning of its conscious human element, it is twisted and imperfect.4
This incomplete creature is immensely powerful and concerned solely with pursuing its own interests, at the expense of everyone else in the world. By showing the ‘monster’ as casting a shadow over a whole community, the unconscious portrays its egotism as the most life-threatening enemy the human race has to face.
We then, however, see how the ‘dark’ figures in every other kind of story also display essentially the same psychological characteristics. The first concern of stories is to show us the nature of this power of egocentricity and what it does to human beings. Naturally, since it is heartlessly self-seeking, it isolates the egotist from everyone around him (except those whose own egotism becomes in some way allied to his). But, equally significantly, we see how an inevitable consequence of egocentricity is that it limits and distorts perception. Someone seeing the world through the ego cannot by definition see objectively. He or she becomes cut off from reality. Seeing only what the ego wishes to see, they fall into a state of delusion. But because such a fantasy-state cannot achieve resolution with reality, this creates an unconscious tendency for the ego to step up its demands, taking on the self-destructive pattern we have seen as the ‘fantasy spiral’. The egotist is driven ever further into unreality. As we see most obviously mirrored in all the different forms of Tragedy, this puts him increasingly at odds with the world around him, until eventually he is likely to collide with reality in a way which is potentially fatal.
By contrast, stories are then concerned to show what is necessary to counter the distorting power of the human ego. The effect of egocentricity is that it disintegrates the psyche, separating subjective consciousness from the objective unconscious. The ego thus becomes identified with what stories portray to us as ‘masculine’ characteristics, most obviously representing a self-centred urge for power and control. In so doing it becomes split off from what stories represent to us as the ‘feminine’ elements in the human psyche. These, combining the capacity to feel sympathetically for others with intuitive understanding, the ability to see objectively and ‘whole’, are rooted in the instinctive unconscious which is essentially selfless.
Hence that fundamental division in stories between the ‘dark masculine’ and the ‘light feminine’, represented by the light heroine. Without the life-giving balance of the selfless values which alone can provide a living connection with other people and with the reality of the world outside it, masculine consciousness must remain cut off and in thrall to the ego. It thus turns into the ‘monster’ and becomes deadly. To counteract the divisive and destructive power of the ego what is needed is a reintegration of the masculine with the feminine.
One of the subtlest of the devices the unconscious uses to portray this psychic split is the way it presents to us the little world or ‘kingdom’ of a story divided into two levels: ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’. This corresponds to the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious in the human psyche.
On the upper level, the world of the story is dominated by a dark figure (or figures), exercising power and control. His, her or their blinkered egocentricity represents the limited vision of ego-consciousness. It is on the ‘inferior level’, in the shadows cast by the egotism which is dominant on the upper level, that we see those light values of selfless feeling and the ability to see whole which have the potential to bring the upper level back to a state of balance. The world ‘below the line’ thus represents the unconscious, containing the life-giving values which the ruling consciousness lacks. Eventually, in a fully-resolved story, we see these values emerging from the inferior realm, to dispel the darkness and restore a state of balance. Thus do stories provide a model of how the divided ‘kingdom’ of the psyche can become reintegrated.
The central means whereby stories show this battle for integration being acted out is by setting it in the context of the most fundamental psychological process in every human life: that by which each individual, as he or she emerges into the world representing a new generation, must grow up to replace the generation which came before.
This is why so often at the beginning of stories we see the central figure as young and single. The aim of the story is to show the hero or heroine working towards that state of integration, the balance of masculine and feminine, which will ultimately enable them to succeed in the right way. The Son-Hero must grow up in the right way to unite with a heroine and become a father. The Daughter-Heroine must grow up to marry a hero, to become a mother. Until they are fully ready to succeed, they remain in some way immature and incomplete. But when they finally reach their goal, we see how they have reached that state of psychic wholeness which is maturity.
To achieve this goal they have to work their way through some version of that ‘archetypal family drama’ which lies at the heart of storytelling. This centres on different aspects of the four archetypal roles which make up the drama of that transition between one generation and the next: Father; Mother; the central figure in the story with whom we identify, its hero or heroine; and finally the ‘other half’ with whom they are to be united to become whole, to make the process complete.
As we have seen, there is no more ingenious device by which the unconscious makes its point in storytelling than the way it uses dark versions of these four archetypal figures to represent the ‘unrealised value’: the negative version of that which the hero or heroine need to make positive in themselves in order to succeed. This is why one or more dark figures, such as a ‘Dark Father’, a ‘Dark Mother’, a dark ‘Alter-Ego’ or dark ‘Other Half’, play such dominant roles through the greater part of most stories, because they each in their different ways correspond to some respect in which the central figure of the story is not yet complete. Only when the hero or heroine themselves reach the point where they are ready for the final state of integration can the darkness be dispelled and the split between ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’ be resolved.
The moment in a story when this integration takes place is marked by the final bringing to light of ‘that which has been hidden’; the release of the redeeming value from the shadows. This may be symbolised as the uncovering of a buried treasure, or the reaching of some long-pursued goal. More explicitly we see this prize as the liberation of the ‘feminine value’, as when a heroine is freed from imprisonment by a monster, or emerges from the darkness in which she has been obscured. But essentially this moment is likely to be symbolised in four ways. Firstly, we see, in some way, a coming together of the masculine and feminine values, most obviously symbolised by an image of a hero or heroine being joined with their ‘other half’ in perfect union. Secondly, we see an image of order restored and life renewed. This may be symbolised in the succession of the hero and heroine to preside over some kind of ‘kingdom’, having established a new centre to their lives where they can ‘live happily ever after’. Thirdly, it is conveyed, they have now reached the centre of their personal identity; they have become most fully themselves. Fourthly, and last, we see how the achieving of this goal may have immense repercussions for the wider community around them. The very fact that they have resolved the problem posed by the dark power and become integrated is portrayed as bringing general benefit to society and humanity as a whole. The ‘kingdom’ or community which was in the shadows, threatened by egotism, has been brought back into the light and restored to itself. The elimination of the dark power by one individual has consequences felt by all.
All these elements put together represent that state of wholeness which is expressed through the archetypal symbolism of the Self. Such is the archetypal pattern by which the unconscious symbolically shows us how we may restore that unity with our unconscious instinctive programming which first began to split apart with the ‘Fall’.
To show the restoration of that state of unity is the only way in which the pattern of a story can be fully resolved; and it must do so according to fundamental rules, which insist that such a resolution can only be achieved under specific conditions, when certain ingredients are in place. If they are not, as in those ‘dark versions’ of stories where the story is told from an ego-centred point of view, the story cannot achieve a proper resolution.
But of course stories do not just present us with an idealised picture of how human nature can achieve a reintegrated state. They also provide us with a mirror to all those different states of psychological imbalance which can prevent human beings from reaching that state of wholeness in the first place.
The psychic split which distinguishes human beings from other animals is not just a matter of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious. Another consequence of our psychic disintegration is that consciousness itself develops in widely differing ways between one individual and another.
This is why, to a far greater extent than other animals, human beings present such a variety of different personality types. We see some people as having strong personalities, others weak. Some are warm and outgoing, others cold and withdrawn. One person may be naturally practical and down-to-earth, another cerebral and detached, a third romantic and emotional, a fourth imaginative and spiritual.
One of the more obvious ways in which such variations in psychological makeup can be analysed is in terms of those four psychic functions which we see in stories making up the state of human wholeness. In reality these four functions constitute a hierarchy of different types of consciousness, each of which can be viewed in its own right as a distinct form of perception or intelligence.
At the most basic level is physical consciousness, that which relates us to the world through our senses, through our physical needs and capabilities. It is this which anchors us to practical realities and can give a strong physical presence. Mental intelligence provides our cognitive ability to analyse, calculate and discriminate, and generally to organise our perception of the world through the power of the mind. It is from these two forms of consciousness that we derive those two ingredients essential to the effectiveness of almost every aspect of human life: strength and structure. But to become life-giving these functions need to be balanced by the ‘feminine’ forms of consciousness: the emotional intelligence which gives the capacity for protective and sympathetic feeling; and that imaginative understanding which can look beyond the limitations of sensory and rational perception, to see how things connect up and fit together.5
For animals living in a state of nature these functions are so instinctively integrated with each other that there is no real separation between them. And when human beings first begin to emerge from the state of nature, for a long time this remains true. One of the more obvious characteristics of the world’s ‘primitive’ peoples, such as those still at the hunter-gatherer stage of human development, is the extent to which they remain close to the instinctive unity of nature. Although their consciousness is immeasurably more developed than that of animals, the different aspects of their psyche continue to work naturally in concert with each other. The way they relate physically to the world around them; the way they organise their mental perception of the world; their sense of fellow-feeling with each other and their natural surroundings; their intuitive sense of belonging to some indivisible spiritual whole: all these modes of psychic operation remain so closely interwoven that it is hard to separate them. But as civilisation evolves and humanity becomes ever more separated from a state of nature, the more these psychic functions tend to become differentiated from one another. And it is here the imbalances arise which become a key factor in the emergence of different types of human personality, because there is then a tendency in each individual to rely more on some forms of consciousness than others. Those functions which are more strongly developed become superior, the others remain inferior. And, where consciousness becomes unbalanced in this way, people tend to become caught out by those functions in which they are less developed.
We are all familiar with some of the more obvious of these forms of imbalance. A ‘sensation type’, for instance, someone who primarily relates to the world in a physical way, may be highly practical but not over-endowed with intellect. Those who are primarily physical may also be caught out by their underdeveloped ‘feminine’ functions, by a lack of feeling for others or of imaginative understanding. We similarly recognise that ‘thinking types’, those who one-sidedly relate to the world through their intellect, may be caught out by their inadequacy in relating to the physical world. This deficiency in consciousness renders them uncoordinated and impractical. They may also find it hard to relate to their emotions, making them cold and unfeeling. Even their strongest function, their power to think, unless this is balanced by intuitive understanding, may simply get lost in abstract pattern-making: as we recognise in such stereotypes as the pedantic lawyer, the dry-as-dust academic or the unfeeling bureaucrat.6
Wherever people’s consciousness becomes too one-sided in this way, their thinking and behaviour become unconsciously influenced in a negative way by those functions in which they are not consciously developed. And in this respect we have to think of unconsciousness in two ways. On one hand there are the deep structures of our unconscious proper, the foundation of our psyche, that ‘collective unconscious’ which we share in common with the rest of humanity. On the other there is that personal element of unconsciousness made up of the areas in which our own individual functioning is deficient.
Not only do these deficiencies unconsciously influence our thinking and behaviour, because they themselves are not operating to full effect. The resulting imbalances can also interfere with the workings of those functions in which we are more strongly developed. This applies equally to the ‘feminine’ functions, which cannot find proper expression unless they have the strength and discipline of their ‘masculine’ balance. Someone who relies primarily on feeling but is weak and lacking in rationality becomes chaotically emotional, lacking the power and discipline to direct their feelings effectively. Someone who is highly intuitive but without controlling reason or a sense of the practical may fall prey to irrational misjudgements, losing precisely that power of understanding which can only be achieved when intuition is disciplined.
There is no one whose personality cannot be analysed in terms of the balance between its ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ components in this way. A man who is strongly ‘masculine’ must inevitably, unless this is balanced by the feeling and imagination which represent his anima, his ‘inner feminine’, remain limited, insensitive and self-centred. He is thus likely to become a bully or a tyrant. Conversely, a man weak in his masculinity, a ‘mother’s boy’, cannot develop either side of his personality properly. Taken over by his ‘negative anima’, he becomes, as we say, effeminate. His capacity for feeling may remain self-centred and sentimental, while his repressed masculinity tends to assert itself only in an ‘inferior’ way, making him feline and petulant.
Similarly a woman’s personality needs the balance of the ‘inner masculine’. Unless a woman’s femininity is given positive balance by the strength of her animus, she remains weak, irrational and disorganised. But again, a woman whose femininity becomes overridden by her inner masculinity becomes hard, assertive and domineering. Taken over by her ‘negative animus’, she becomes, as we say, a virago. Quick to find fault or to take offence, eager to pick a quarrel, her negative animus speaks in a parody of masculine rationality while talking irrational nonsense.
What all these permutations on the disintegrated psyche have in common is that they are centred on the inability of the ego properly to integrate with the selfless level of the unconscious. They are all therefore different manifestations of immaturity; and certainly nothing provides a clearer mirror than the world of stories to all the ways in which human beings can fall short of that state of integration. But what they also present us with is a model of what is required for any human being to achieve maturity. This means that he or she must consciously have reached a state of harmony with the unconscious. They must have achieved a balance between the masculine and feminine elements in their personality: between body and mind, heart and soul. Only through bringing all these together can anyone rise above the limitations of the ego to become identified with their inmost Self. And to show how this state can be achieved (and how and why human beings fall short of achieving it) is the central purpose of storytelling.
When an acorn falls onto the ground, it contains all the genetic information it needs to grow up into a perfect, fully developed oak tree. When a human baby is born, it contains all the genetic programming it needs to develop physically into a fully grown man or woman. What it does not have is the instinctive programming to ensure that it will eventually grow up psychologically into a fully mature human being. It is precisely this lack for which the archetypal patterns which underlie storytelling have emerged through evolution to compensate.
To just what extent these unconscious patterns can be said to be part of the common genetic inheritance of mankind may call for qualification. Almost all the individual stories we have been looking at in this book have been drawn only from one cultural tradition, that of our own Western civilisation, even though this includes by far the most richly developed complex of storytelling in the world and can trace its roots, via Greek and Middle Eastern mythology, far back into pre-history. Some of the story-forms which have evolved within that tradition, such as Comedy, are rarely found outside it. But even when we look outside our own tradition to, say, the mythology and folk tales of the indigenous peoples of Africa or the Americas, we still find that same core of symbolism which forms the basis of all storytelling.
A story told by the tribes who once roamed the Great Plains of the American Middle-West is the tale we know in its Cheyenne form as Jumping Mouse. There was once a little mouse, living busily in a forest with all the other mice around him, who one day heard a strange, faint roaring noise, seemingly coming from far away. None of the other mice could hear it, but when it persisted, he eventually set off on his own to see what it was. He runs into a raccoon (in some versions a fox) who guides him nearer and nearer to the source of the roaring, until the little mouse finds himself looking at a mighty river. Here a frog tells him to jump up in the air. When the mouse does so, he falls into the water and gets horribly wet. But while jumping, the mouse has glimpsed far off the most beautiful sight he has ever seen: the ‘Sacred Mountains’ (in some versions, just one mountain). The frog tells him he has now become ‘Jumping Mouse’ and he returns to his fellow-mice to tell them of the amazing thing he has seen. They have no idea what he is talking about and dismiss him as mad.
So obsessed has Jumping Mouse become with his Sacred Mountains, however, that he sets off on a long, lonely journey to reach them. He eventually emerges from the forest to the edge of a great open plain, stretching as far as the eye can see. Wheeling in the sky above it are eagles, which would like nothing more than to catch a mouse for their dinner. But he then encounters a bison which has lost its sight. The bison says it has been told that, if only it could be given the eye of a mouse, it would regain its sight. Jumping Mouse hands over one of his eyes and the bison, now able to see, carries him safely over the plain to the foothills of the Sacred Mountains. Here the bison can go no further, but the mouse then runs into a wolf (in some versions a bear) which has also been struck blind. The mouse surrenders its second eye, the wolf regains its sight and carries the mouse, now itself blind, up into the mountains until they reach the shore of a sacred lake, where the wolf leaves the mouse all alone.
As the mouse is abandoned, weak and defenceless, it is not long before a mighty eagle swoops down to attack him. As its talons strike, the mouse feels the shock of death. But he finds himself being carried up into the air and, as he soars up into the heavens, he finds his sight and strength miraculously returning. ‘Mouse’, the story ends, ‘has become Eagle’.
Although this story comes from a cultural tradition which could scarcely be more remote from our own, there is nothing about its fundamental message we cannot immediately recognise. It begins with the group of mice all preoccupied with their busy, mundane, ego-centred existence. Only one has an intuitive apprehension that, somewhere, there is something far more important to life than just this limited little view of the world, and sets out on his long, hazardous Quest to reach it. We recognise the way the hero only makes progress towards his distant goal by self-sacrificing acts of generosity to other animals, who then become his helpers. And obviously the story’s main theme, as it describes how an initially ordinary little figure finds himself eventually transformed into something immeasurably greater, is entirely familiar: even if he only becomes at one with the power of the universal life-force at the moment when his separate ego-identity finally dissolves in death.
The essential message of storytelling all over the world is that there are two centres to human nature: and that to become reunited with the totality of life it is necessary to make the long and difficult transition from one to the other. From our earliest years, the first point the unconscious tries to make through stories is that the greatest danger to the human race is its own capacity to think and to act egocentrically. This is why those first properly-formed stories which make sense to us as a child tend to show a little hero or heroine, much like ourselves, venturing out into a mysterious outside world, such as a great forest, where they encounter some terrifying dark figure: a witch, a giant, a wolf or some other monster. The purpose of this is to introduce the child to a personification of that dark power of egotism which it must learn to recognise as its most deadly enemy.
Initially this enemy is shown as something wholly external; and the point of such stories, as we saw, is simply to awaken the child’s subconscious awareness to the fact that, in this strange new world it is entering, such a deadly power exists. But progressively, as we grow older, the message is filled out, as it conveys to us with greater subtlety and depth those qualities the hero or heroine must develop for them to reach the complete happy ending; not least when we come to those types of story which show the hero or heroine having to wrestle with that same dark power in themselves.
So, whether we respond to it or not, does the constant feeding of our imagination with stories provide us with a unique mirror to the inner dynamics of human nature. Above all, below the level of our consciousness, the consistency of their symbolism gradually builds up an image of what the pattern of a human life can be, and what happens if we fail.
We all have in our minds a generalised outline of how a human life unfolds (even if in reality many individual lives vary from it). The pattern begins with the child being born into a family with a mother and a father. Initially living at home in an intimate relationship with its mother, the child then begins to venture into the outside world, embarking on its socialisation and education as part of a wider community. At the end of adolescence, it is ready to go out into the world in a quite different way, as it breaks away from dependence on its parents and begins to establish an independent life. As a young man or woman entering on adult life, they are not only discovering ‘what they want to be’ but are ready to begin looking for their ‘other half’ with whom to establish a new home, as the basis on which to start a new family. The preoccupations of this phase of life then become to establish a place in the outside world and to watch over the children as they grow up towards adulthood in turn.
Then, in this idealised picture, comes the moment when the tasks of ‘the first half of life’ are completed, and now begins the ‘second half’. The man or the woman may be able to take on more responsible roles in their work or the wider community, for which they are now equipped by age and experience. They are ready to play their roles as grandparents, reassured at the confirmation this brings that the life for which they have been responsible is continuing into the future. At this point, if they have learned from their experience of life, they know themselves and the ways of the world. They have become fully mature, even wise. Eventually old age overtakes them, they withdraw from the world and prepare for death.
In the light of this outline, we can see how the most comprehensive of the basic plots is Rags to Riches, in that it comes nearest to providing a symbolic model for human life. More consistently than any other, this type of story begins by showing its central figure in childhood. This enables it to set out all the essential stages of human development, as the initially humble and disregarded little hero or heroine embark on the long road to the point where they will eventually be able to identify with that greater ‘Self’ which has been potentially hidden in them all along.
When we first meet the hero or heroine of a Rags to Riches story, we see them in the situation in which we all begin our lives, overshadowed by the presence of parents and everyone around us. But the vital quality they must be shown as possessing, in contrast to the dark figures around them, is that they are essentially good-hearted, because this shows they are not egocentric. They are in tune with their deeper, selfless instincts, which is the vital precondition of their eventually being qualified to reach the ultimate goal.
The first step, the pattern shows, is for the hero or heroine in childhood to make some venture into the outside world. This symbolises the need for each of us in childhood to establish a secure sense of our own independent identity: the need to build up what the psychologists call our ‘ego-complex’, that which enables us to relate confidently to the world around us. We all need a strong ego, because it is the centre of our awareness of the world. But the crucial question to be answered is whether that ego is acting only in its own interest, or whether it is acting in harmony with some deeper instinctive pattern which can connect it positively with reality and the world outside itself.
At this early stage of life, like all of us, the hero or heroine are still essentially dependent on the adults around them, which is why they are likely to be overshadowed by ‘Dark Father’ or ‘Dark Mother’ figures, representing negative versions of what they themselves must eventually redeem into a positive in order to succeed. But what may carry them through these early stages of life is their alliance with ‘helpful animals’, like Aladdin’s genies (derived from the same root as our word ‘genes’), representing all those instinctive gifts and abilities on which we rely in youth, before we can achieve conscious Self-understanding.
Then, at the end of adolescence, comes that second, even more significant act of stepping into the outside world, where we enter on the stage of adult life (which is where so many stories based on other plots begin). And here the story shows how these innate qualities may lead in due course to what seems outwardly like a happy ending, as when, like Aladdin, we may get married and enjoy great success in the outside world. But at this point in the story we come to that highly significant moment in the basic Rags to Riches story which we see as the ‘central crisis’.
All that the hero or heroine have so far achieved seems to be snatched away from them, so that in a sense they have to begin the process of working towards their goal all over again. The purpose of this in the story’s archetype is to emphasise that the outward fulfilment they have so far enjoyed is not the real goal that they must reach. To reach true maturity requires having to go through the most demanding process of all: to develop that real strength of character based on self-understanding which brings personal autonomy. This can only be achieved by someone who consciously achieves a complete balance of the masculine and feminine components in their personality: who has developed the inner strength which brings authority, combined with that wisdom of heart and soul which can only come from experience.
In this respect the Rags to Riches plot, particularly as set out in its more developed versions, such as Aladdin, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, reflects the way in which the process of psychological development in a human life falls into two parts. The overriding task of ‘the first half of life’ is for us to establish a secure sense of our individual identity while at the same time learning how to accommodate that to the demands of society around us. In youth we have abounding life, energy and dreams of the future, but we need to learn how to control that vitality to the point where we can become established in our adult role in society. In an outward sense, we discover ‘what we want to be in life’. We may be able to achieve all those outward goals which conform with the norms of society, such as earning a living, getting married, setting up a new home, establishing a family. But all these landmarks can be achieved without any great depth of self-knowledge. It is possible to achieve them while remaining inwardly immature.
Eventually, however, comes a point where, if we are going to continue on the road of personal development, we must embark on the tasks belonging to ‘the second half of life’, which are quite different because they require us to look within. They require us to develop much greater Self-understanding. We must learn to see ourselves objectively, recognising not just our strengths but also our deficiencies, our ‘shadow’, and to work to amend them. Only through such conscious Self-knowledge can anyone develop that inner strength based on emotional and spiritual understanding which is essential to true maturity.
For many people, of course, it is quite possible to go through the second half of life without really embarking on this process at all, so that they remain fundamentally immature and ego-centred, having not really moved forward from where their development stopped in the first half of life. Inwardly they are frozen in a kind of perpetual adolescence, hanging onto the values of youth, as we see in the puer aeternus, the ‘boy hero who cannot grow up’, who often then slips over into that other form of immaturity we see in the archetype of the senex: that which characterises those unfulfilled older people who take out their disappointment in life in querulous moralising about the world and reminiscing how much better things were in former times.
For those who do continue to grow inwardly, the ultimate prize is to be brought into a conscious relationship with that archetype which is at the centre of them all, ‘the Self’: that which is both most completely ourselves, yet not ourselves, because it represents the ultimate state of reintegration between the conscious ego and the selfless objectivity of the unconscious.7
Such is the goal which is symbolised at the end of stories by the hero and heroine’s final coming together in perfect love and succeeding to rule over a ‘kingdom’. Superficially this might be taken to stand for no more than a reflection of that natural, near-universal process whereby the vast majority of the human race eventually leave their parents to pair off in marriage, and to set up their own ‘kingdom’ in a new home. But from the way the unconscious presents all this to us in stories it is clearly meant to represent something much deeper and more significant; and this is particularly underlined by the archetype of the Quest, the plot which more explicitly than any other presents human life as a journey towards the distant goal of Self-realisation.
Not the least interesting feature of the Quest archetype is that it appears not to be directly concerned with the patterns of psychological development in childhood and early life at all. It is preoccupied with that process of final Self-realisation which really belongs to ‘the second half of life’. It is significant that the heroes of Quest stories are often full-grown men, who may well be already married.8 The problem with which they are confronted is that described by Dante in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy, when he recalls how ‘midway on the journey of this life, I came to a dark wood where the way was lost’. Their starting point is that they have arrived at that stage in adult life where living unthinkingly in the state of ego-consciousness may suddenly become intolerably constricting. Life in this ‘City of Destruction’, trapped in a mortal body doomed to die, suddenly seems shallow and oppressive. Is there no escape from this prison? Like the Jumping Mouse, they then have the sense that, far off, there is another, quite different centre to existence, and that to reach it has become the most important thing in their lives.
The archetypal pattern of the Quest shows that the journey they now face is indeed long and arduous, and that it is hard enough simply to get near enough to see the nature of this mysterious ego-transcending goal, the Self. But even when this has at last been brought clearly in view, the hardest struggle of all begins. This is the battle with all the temptations and challenges which the ego throws up in a last-ditch bid to defend itself, until the moment when its resistance is finally overcome and it merges with the Self. Such is the moment vividly symbolised in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when Frodo finally sees Sauron’s ring, the ring of the ego, slipping away into the Cracks of Doom. Once again the ego becomes one with that ‘ground of being’ from which it long ago emerged, leaving the hero with a sense of cosmic liberation he could never have imagined possible.
The Voyage and Return plot is much less ambitious. Here we come back to the type of story where the hero or heroine is usually shown as a young person just setting out on adult life. It is precisely because they are young and as yet without any real Self-understanding that they are shown living fecklessly in a state of ego-consciousness. They think they know who they are, as we all do at the start of adult life. But suddenly the bottom falls out of their world. All the assumptions on which they have based their idea of their own identity are blown apart by their abrupt arrival in a totally unfamiliar world, where they can no longer be sure of anything. The purpose of the Voyage and Return plot is to provide a model for that shocking confrontation between the limited vision of ego-consciousness and the mysterious world of the unconscious. The encounter may at first be exhilarating, but in the end it becomes threatening precisely because their ego–consciousness has not yet got the point and ‘seen the light’. Finally the penny drops and the hero or heroine learns in some way to see objectively and whole (as we see even when little Peter Rabbit hops up on that wheelbarrow to get sight of the whole garden). They are finally able to make the ‘thrilling escape from death’ which can return them to the everyday world. They are at last properly conscious.
At this point, however, compared with the Quest, the Voyage and Return story stops short. It describes that shift of perspective which is a necessary prelude to union with the Self; but, except in rare instances, such as The Golden Ass, it does not then continue to the full resounding conclusion we see in, say, the Odyssey or The Divine Comedy. Indeed a conspicuous feature of this plot is the number of stories it inspires which show their central figure, like the heroes of Evelyn Waugh’s novels or Scarlett O’Hara, returning to where they started, from what should have been a life-renewing encounter with the world of the unconscious, but having learned nothing. This may above all be symbolised by the fact that their ‘other half’, representing their capacity for selfless love and understanding, has been left behind. However entertaining they may be, such stories tell us much more about the particular psychological shortcomings of their authors, such as Waugh or Salinger or Lewis Carroll or J. M. Barrie, than they do about the deeper levels of human nature.
The distinction of Comedy is that the unconscious here particularly focuses on the contagious effect of egotism on a whole group or community of people. Because one dominant figure in particular, on the ‘upper level’, is in the grip of egotism, this casts a distorting shadow over everyone around them. Everyone in the community is thrown into confusion by the fact that there is something which has not yet come to light, so that they are all stumbling round in a fog of misunderstanding and pretence. Everyone is thus set at odds, in one way or another dominated by the influence of that dark power operating ‘above the line’, until the moment at the end of the story where everything which has been hidden is revealed, including, usually, the realisation by the central dark figure of how blindly and egocentrically he has been behaving. At this point the selfless power of the unconscious, so often personified in the story’s heroine, can finally be released from ‘below the line’, bringing the community joyfully together. Again the story provides a symbolic model of what can happen when consciousness and the unconscious are at last reintegrated.
Everyone can recall the extraordinary mood which can come over an audience as it leaves a theatre or cinema after seeing a Comedy which has worked its magic. It is no accident that few things in storytelling have greater power to move us. After all the frustrations and confusions which preceded it, the final twists of the plot leave us – and the entire audience – feeling strangely overjoyed and uplifted by the sight of how everything came out miraculously right after all.
The same model, although more specifically focused on what is happening within the psyche of one individual, is that which the unconscious presents to us in the plot of Rebirth. The central figure is shown frozen in ego-consciousness, trapped by limited vision, unable to develop, to the point where this is symbolised as a kind of living death. But eventually, inspired by the redeeming figure who symbolises the selfless power of the unconscious, the prison of ego-consciousness is broken open. Precisely because the hero or heroine have been put back in touch with the deeper level of the unconscious, their hearts and eyes are opened. Because their feeling and understanding have been awoken, they are liberated to become whole.
Such are the patterns whereby the unconscious shows us how humanity can overcome that fatal separation which took place with the ‘Fall’. Before we move on, however, this has one further consequence which is of profound relevance to how we imagine stories. This is the way in which, to make sense of the world, our split-off consciousness needs constantly to see it in terms of opposites.
Nothing is more basic to the processes of human thinking than how we divide everything into oppositions between one thing and another. We orientate ourselves through the world by speaking of up or down, forward or backwards, left or right, over or under, long or short, heavy or light, hot or cold, dry or wet, soft or hard, future or past, good or bad, light or dark, alive or dead. So fundamental is this dualism to the way our consciousness works that we are scarcely aware of what an omnipresent part it plays in our thinking. And this duality is of course one of the crucial ways in which we establish and define our own identity, because we are constantly dividing the world into groups and entities which make us aware that we belong on one side of the line rather than the other. We recognise our own identity in sensing our difference from the ‘others’.
Each of us is profoundly aware, for instance, that we are either male or female. We are aware that we belong to one country rather than all the rest, to one part of that country, to one city, town or village, to one family. This sense of belonging to one place or group rather than others, and all the loyalties it brings with it, obviously plays a large part in building up our sense of who we are and how we fit in on this earth. But the most fundamental division of all is that which gives each of us a sense of our own individual identity, separate from everyone and everything else in the world. This is the division which, steming from our ego-consciousness, we again experience to a degree unique in the animal kingdom. And it is this division which more than anything else the patterns of storytelling are designed to overcome, as they work towards a point where the opposites can become reconciled and transcended.
This is why nothing is more central to the way in which stories shape themselves in the human unconscious than the idea of bringing that which is unbalanced and incomplete to a final state of balance and completion. This is why stories are concerned with reconciling dualities, such as masculine and feminine, ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’, ego and Self, in all that they symbolise. This is also why in so many stories we see the need for the hero or heroine to tread a path between two opposites, each of which is negative, inadequate or wrong in its own way.
One of the greatest problems posed to us by the partial nature of our consciousness is the difficulty of judging correctly the point of balance between opposing viewpoints. When we see two people locked in bitter dispute, almost invariably neither is wholly right. Each may be partly right and partly wrong. The truth lies not so much at some halfway point between them as in some third position, from which their opposing views can be seen in a wider and clearer perspective. Again, as with the archetypes themselves, almost everyone and everything in the human world presents both light and dark aspects. Yet it is only too natural to us to oversimplify: to see only the light or only the dark. The truth in human affairs almost invariably lies not on one side or the other of a set of opposites, but in some third position which transcends them both.
Again and again in stories we see that deadly division between two opposing figures, each in their own way ‘one-sided’; such as when we see the heroine having fallen into the clutches of a villain or monster, the ‘light feminine’ in the grip of the ‘dark masculine’. We know that such an impasse can only be resolved by the intervention of a third figure, the hero, representing the balance of qualities which can rise above it. Such is the subtlest message of that archetypal ‘rule of three’. The way of growth, allowing a story to reach a happy ending, lies not just in taking a middle way between two inadequate extremes; it lies in achieving that third state, transcending both, which alone can bring about the transformation necessary to reconnect with life.
Such was the real reason why the ancient Greeks inscribed over the the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the most sacred spot in the Greek world, their belief that the highest value in life was meden agan, ‘nothing in excess’.9 This grew out of the same intuitive process which had led them to develop their belief in the counterpoint of hubris and nemesis. They were aware that hubris, ‘stepping over the bounds’, represents that imbalance which arises from the inevitable tendency to one-sidedness of the human ego: while nemesis represents that inexorable redressing of balance which ensures that the state of cosmic wholeness will eventually be restored.
The ‘knowledge’ of all this is so deeply imprinted into the human psyche that it unconsciously lies at the heart of storytelling. We cannot imagine stories in any other way. It is precisely to ‘remind’ us of what our limited state of ego-consciousness so easily overlooks that evolution developed in us the capacity to conjure up these patterns of images. And it is only when we begin to understand how this is their real underlying purpose that we can properly begin to explore the relationship between the imaginary world of storytelling and how we live our lives in what we like to call ‘the real world’. Such is the theme of our next chapter.