‘The minority is always right ... the majority is always wrong.’
Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
‘So long as one is within a certain phenomenology one is not astonished, and no one wonders what it is all about. Such philosophical doubt only comes to him who is outside the game.’
C. G. Jung, Psychology and National Problems, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII
One of the hardest things to get straight about stories is their relationship with what we call ‘real life’ and the ‘real world’ in which we all live. We often hear such dismissive phrases as ‘that’s only a story’ or ‘that’s just a fairy tale’. When people wish to suggest that something is completely untrue, they say ‘it’s a myth’. The assumption is that what happens in fact and what happens in fiction are so far apart that they are actually opposed to one another.
It is true the relationship between storytelling and real life may not be immediately obvious. But this may be because we are missing the point of what stories really represent. And the main reason for this is that the only instrument we can use to disentangle the true nature of our ability to imagine stories is that from which they originate in the first place, the human psyche. The problem is that the archetypal patterns and laws which shape storytelling are so deeply embedded in our unconscious that our conscious mind finds it hard to recognise them. So instinctive is it to us that stories should take shape in certain ways that we find it almost impossible to stand sufficiently apart from them to ask why this should be so; why, for instance, they should take these forms and not others. Yet once we do manage to make this leap of understanding, we can also begin to see how these same patterns play a huge part in shaping our thinking and our lives in all sorts of ways which have nothing to do with storytelling. Indeed, the real significance of our ability to tell stories is twofold. Firstly, it provides a uniquely revealing mirror to the inner dynamics of human nature. But secondly, by laying bare the unconscious foundations which underlie so much of the way we view the world, this can in turn cast an extraordinarily revealing light on history, politics, religion, philosophy and almost every aspect of human thought and behaviour.
One of the starting points for my own interest in why we tell stories was a revue sketch staged in London by an American theatre company in the early 1960s. It showed a meeting which had been called in a small middle-American town to discuss a complaint that the copy of Jack and the Beanstalk on the shelves of the local library was a ‘subversive book’ and should be banned. To discuss this the lady chairman has invited along two professors, a Marxist and a Freudian. The Marxist explains that Jack and the Beanstalk is indeed a political tract, nothing less than ‘a blueprint for world revolution’. As typical members of the downtrodden rural proletariat in a post-feudal society, Jack and his mother are reduced to such poverty that they are finally forced in desperation to sell the only asset they possess, their cow. The only place they can sell it is on the free market, inevitably used by the rich to exploit the poor. Naturally all Jack gets in return is a worthless handful of beans. But these symbols of their exploitation grow up into ‘the mighty beanstalk of the workers’ movement’; and when Jack climbs to the top, what does he find but the wicked giant of ‘international monopoly capitalism’. Eventually he strikes the revolutionary blow which brings the tyranny crashing down. Having won this glorious victory, the proletariat, represented by Jack and his mother, win the right to live happily ever after.
While this dissertation is proceeding, the Freudian impatiently interrupts to insist that this is just childish hooey. The true meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk is that it is no more than ‘the simple, rather touching story of a young boy’s sexual awakening’. Like any small boy, Jack lives with the person who is closest to him in the world, his mother. But the day comes when he must move on from his initial state of infantile dependence on mother, symbolised by the milk-giving cow. This is when he discovers that he has in his hand beans, ‘seminal essences’, from which there rises up in front of him ‘this thrusting, enormous, towering ...’. ‘Ye-a-a-s’, hastily interjects the lady chairman. Climbing up this symbol of his awakening manhood, the Freudian continues, what does Jack find at the top but the ‘non-improjected fantasy image of Father’. ‘Father’ naturally rejects this challenge to his masculine authority and tries to drive him back down the beanstalk. But eventually our hero hits back by grabbing an axe to eliminate ‘Father’, so that, in line with his Oedipal urge, he can return to live with mother happily ever after.
Increasingly bemused by the force of the two rival interpretations, the lady chairman sums up by telling the audience that, thanks to their two speakers, ‘we now all realise that Jack and the Beanstalk is not only subversive. It is also very dirty, and should definitely be taken off our library shelves’.1
Obviously what was striking about this sketch was how it brought out such a startling correspondence between the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and two of the most influential thought-systems of the twentieth century. But was it possible, I reflected as I watched the sketch, that there might be some deeper reason for these coincidences? Might there be some fundamental structure underlying the way we think about the world which could account for this seemingly remarkable overlap between Marx’s analysis of society, Freudian psychology and a centuries-old folk tale? Indeed we can now see that there is an archetypal structure underlying all of them. And in terms of what this really signifies, in terms of human psychology, we can see how the ‘Freudian interpretation’, for all its inadequacies, does in fact gets rather closer than the Marxist’s to the true underlying meaning of the tale. The story of Jack is indeed rooted in that pattern central to storytelling, showing the pattern of a young man’s growing up to maturity. Where the Freudian interpretation begins to fall short, however, is in its inability to recognise the true nature of the giant/Dark Father, as representing the negative version of the Light Father the young hero must eventually become. With its distortingly narrow focus on sexuality, Freudian psychology cannot then offer any proper explanation of the treasures Jack wins from the giant. And although the Freudians may get very excited by the fact that Jack returns at the end to live with mother, they cannot see that the tale ends like this only because it is a version of the archetypal story intended to be told to very young children.
Paradoxically, what is in fact rather more interesting is the way this archetypal story lends itself so neatly to a Marxist interpretation. This is not just because it can show us the psychological foundations which underlie the Marxist view of society. More significantly it opens up the much wider question of how the archetypal structures revealed by storytelling can help us to understand the workings of any human society, and how they shape some of the most fundamental ways in which we view the world around us. This is because, to a far greater degree than we are consciously aware, we look at the world in terms of stories all the time. They are the most natural way in which we structure our descriptions of the world around us. We naturally see our own life as a story, as we do those of others, each made up of an infinite number of subordinate episodes, large and small. Through the media, we view the pageant of public life as a continual kaleidoscope of stories, complete with ‘dark’ figures and ‘light’, happy and unhappy endings.
Certainly the Marxist, like any ideologue, interprets how the world works in terms of a basic story: one which can tell him who are the villains, who the heroes, how he would like the plot to end up. But to a great extent, irrespective of our point of view, the same is true for all of us. And nowhere can we see this more clearly than in the unconscious patterns which shape not only how we ‘read’ the events of politics and history, but how these dramas themselves are acted out.
Apart from a hero or heroine, stories usually present us with the picture of a group of people – a household, a community, a kingdom – which provides the focus of the imaginary world in which the story is set. During much of the story this ‘little world’ or ‘kingdom’ may in some way be divided. But if the story comes to a happy ending we see it in some way being brought back to unity. And, as we have seen, there is a close correspondence between the conditions which are necessary for this reintegration to take place and the pattern of integration in the individual human psyche.
In anyone who has achieved personal maturity, we see how this combines strength of character and the capacity for ordered thinking with selfless feeling and the intuitive ability to see objectively and whole. Similarly, in the resolution of a story which comes to a happy ending we see these same essential values being brought together to create an image of ‘wholeness’ in the wider community. As darkness gives way to light, so we see power in that household, community or kingdom once again being exercised properly and wisely. Order is restored, so that everything and everyone are back in their proper place. Love and reconciliation prevail. That which was hidden has come to light so that, as ‘ignorance gives way to knowledge’, everything and everyone can at last be seen clearly for what they are.
The significance of this particular combination of values is not just limited to the imaginary world of storytelling. It equally provides an ideal model for the workings of any social grouping in the real world. Every human collectivity, whether it be a nation, a family or any other type of organisation, is by definition hierarchical. One or more figures – a monarch, a tribal leader, a president, a prime minister, a chairman, a general, a father, a mother – are in a position of power, playing the role of leader, exercising authority. When that authority is exercised properly, combining masculine with feminine values, firmness and order united with feeling and understanding, the community itself remains united. But when those in authority fail to exercise power properly what we see is that the community splits in familiar fashion onto two levels, ‘above’ and ‘below the line’.
The fact that on the upper level power is being misused invariably means that it is in some way being exercised selfishly and blindly. Either it is being applied excessively and oppressively, or it is being used weakly and inadequately. Just as in stories, this abuse of power inevitably casts a shadow over those below the line. And it is here, among those in the shadows, that people can see most clearly how they are being misruled, and how what is missing in those ‘above the line’ is that balance of masculine and feminine qualities which are essential to just and wise governance.
This constitutes what has been the central political fault line in almost every society throughout history. Every society is made up of rulers and ruled, those who govern and those who are governed, and obviously an immense part of human history has been written in the tension and potential conflict between the two. Above the line have been those who wished to hold onto and extend their power: if they were dictators or absolute rulers, through fear and force. From below the line has come a constant pressure to restrain that power and to make the rulers accountable, which has given rise not just to constitutional government, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law but also to all the revolutions and wars of independence in history.
The first thinker who discerned what amounted to an unconscious archetype shaping political behaviour was Plato in Book VIII of his Republic. He analysed the tendency of societies to evolve through a cycle which begins with Monarchy, the rule of one leader and father-figure to all his people, the king. But this eventually leads to pressure from those immediately below him to restrain his power, and this emergence of a ruling class made up of a few rich and powerful individuals leads on to the second stage of the cycle, Oligarchy, This in turn leads to pressure from below them for a much wider dispersal of power, where in the name of liberty the people demand the right to participate in framing their laws and calling their government to account. This third stage is Democracy. But the cycle, as Plato described it, does not stop there. The belief in liberty becomes increasingly obsessive, particularly affecting all those who can still be viewed as ‘below the line’ and oppressed. Women rebel against their roles as wives and mothers; slaves against their masters; children against parents and teachers. People are even expected to respect the ‘rights’ of animals. The growing disorder of a society in which every kind of rule from above has fallen into disrepute eventually creates pressure for the final phase of the cycle, Tyranny: where again one man imposes his power, to restore order to a society in danger of disintegrating.
In psychological terms it is this same perennial fault line which helps explain that fundamental opposition in politics between ‘right’ and ‘left’. The right wing view rests chiefly on the masculine values, centred on the exercise of power and the maintenance of order; what may be called the values of ‘Father’. This is innately conservative because it believes in upholding the established structures and institutions of society. It supports those values which it sees as holding society together: the symbols of the nation state, tradition, patriotism, conventional morality, the family, discipline, the need for strength to defend the existing order against its external and internal enemies. The left wing rests essentially on the feminine values of feeling and understanding, what may be called the values of ‘Mother’, in which it perceives the ruling order and the right-wing view in general to be so heartlessly deficient. It talks about liberty, compassion and equality. It protests against oppression and the injustices of the system. It proclaims the need to raise up all those whom society places ‘below the line’, the workers, anyone who can be seen as exploited or as underdogs. It does not wish to preserve a hierarchical order which it sees as corrupt and unjust. It believes in change and the vision of a future society which is fairer and more caring; in which everyone can have an equal chance; which is not bound by narrow exclusive nationalism but sees all humanity as one.2
We see this same division between the values of ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ in the way people’s political views tend to change over the years: that general human tendency to follow the pattern summed up in the maxim of Huey Long, the one-time governor of Louisiana, that ‘every man’s political career reads like a book, from left to right’. When people are young, unsettled, just starting on the ladder of life, they are more inclined to take a ‘feminine’, ‘below the line’ view; to be idealistic, to feel deeply the injustices of the world, to rebel against what they see as the constraints of discipline, established convention and the stern values of ‘Father’. When, as they grow older and more mature, they themselves become more established, with more experience of the world, they are inclined to take a more masculine, ‘above the line’ view. Idealism gives way, as they would see it, to realism. They come to appreciate the conservative values of discipline, tradition and order. They at last see the point of those values of ‘Father’ (not least because they may well have been through the educative experience of being a parent themselves). It was this familiar shift taking place in people’s psychic perspective which gave rise to Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum that ‘anyone who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, anyone who is not a conservative at forty has no head’.3
In psychological terms, of course, these two opposing views are simply the two halves of the same whole. To make up the archetype of totality, the Self, each needs the balance of the other. And the more one-sided people’s political view becomes, the more they are likely to see the other side in terms of caricature. The right-winger sees the left as ‘dangerous anarchists’, ‘raving Bolsheviks’, ‘bleeding heart liberals’, out to destroy all social order. The left-winger sees the right as ‘vicious tyrants’, ‘racist reactionaries’, ‘Fascist pigs’, whose only concern is to oppress the defenceless and underprivileged. This is not to say that each side may not have justification for its view. But because by definition this kind of division arouses the human ego, each side tends to end up projecting the shadow of its own one-sidedness onto the other. This is why nothing is commoner in political conflict than ‘the fallacy of the half-truth’, whereby politicians finds it much easier to identify the weaknesses in the position of their opponents than to recognise the deficiencies in their own.
What happens in the archetypal version is that it shows what is necessary for the two sides to become in some way reconciled. The egocentricity and blindness of those exercising power above the line is redeemed by their recognition of the selfless values represented by those below the line. The whole community can thus be brought together in unity. This may, according to the archetypal pattern, be what ought to happen. What in the real world is more likely to happen is that the two sides remain locked in conflict. Those above the line continue to abuse their power; and in extreme cases this may eventually provoke in those below the line a dream of rising up in an attempt to overthrow the power of their oppressors by force. This is because, in the real world, those below the line are not necessarily just embodiments of the selfless redeeming values, as they are in a story. They may well become just as much possessed by collective egotism as those above the line. However genuine and justified their demands for truth, justice and compassion may originally have been, these may no longer be entirely selfless and absolute. In becoming politicised they have also become sentimentalised, hi-jacked by the collective ego to justify its drive to power.
It is here we see the emergence of that Utopian revolutionary mindset, as in Marxism, which comes to see the existing power structure as so oppressive and corrupt that it is beyond redemption. It must be torn down altogether and replaced by a new one. In their fantasies the revolutionaries become driven by a projected vision of the Self, a new order in which society can be remade and reintegrated in a perfect form, where power can be exercised justly and wisely to the benefit of all. In reality this vision of the Self has been taken over by the collectivised ego. All those who, for whatever reason, cannot subscribe to this vision must be crushed and eliminated, as ‘enemies of the people’.
Thus do we see the emergence of that familiar ‘dark inversion’ whereby, in the name of creating the ideal state, bringing justice and liberty for society’s dispossessed, a totalitarian new order emerges, much more ruthless and oppressive than that which it has replaced. What has happened is that the forces below the line, consciously motivated by the feminine values, have become unconsciously possessed by a dark version of precisely that masculine drive to power and control they so resent in those above the line. And at this point we see how the archetype which has really taken over is that of Tragedy. We see just why any revolutionary dream inevitably becomes self-defeating. Indeed it is here in the archetype of Tragedy that we can at last begin to unravel the true relationship between the unconscious patterns which shape stories and those which shape human behaviour in real life.
It is no accident that so many of the world’s best-known fictional tragedies were originally inspired by historical events, or by events which actually occurred in real life: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Richard III, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir, the film Bonnie and Clyde, to name but a few. The reason why these episodes translated so neatly into fictional form was that the way they unfolded in real life (or at least as they were presented by historians) so closely followed the pattern of the tragic archetype. And the reason they did so was that this five-stage tragic cycle is not just an arbitrary construct of the human imagination. It is a pattern we see constantly being acted out in the world around us, because it is the pattern of what may follow whenever people, whether individually or collectively, are drawn to embark on a course of action based on ego-centred fantasy.
Exactly as in any fictional version, this is likely in some way to be based either on a desire for power (or money, a version of the same thing), or on sexuality. It may involve the planning of a crime or the start of an illicit love affair. It may be any scheme which involves deceiving others or any kind of reckless gamble. There will invariably be some form of Anticipation Stage when those possessed by the power of fantasy are looking for a Focus. When they find it, they commit the act which launches them irretrievably on their dark course. For a while, because they have taken the initiative or because what they are up to remains undetected, all seems to go well (Dream Stage). They seem to be getting away with it. But because what they are acting out is ultimately based on defying their surrounding framework of reality, they begin to run into difficulties. Other people and events begin to constellate against them (Frustration Stage). In an increasingly desperate attempt to keep the fantasy in being they push on, committing further dark acts, or attempting to cover up what they have done, as reality closes in on them (Nightmare Stage). Finally comes that moment when the fantasy collides with reality, bringing about their downfall or destruction.
Looking at history, we see how this cycle repeats itself again and again. We may see it in what happens to individual politicians, as when in 1972 President Nixon connived in the burglary of his opponents’ headquarters at the Watergate. What eventually forced him two years later to become the first American President in history to resign from office was not so much this original ‘dark act’ but the way he became increasingly caught out by his efforts to deny and to hide his involvement in what had happened. Repeatedly in the history of politics we see that what destroys a politician’s career is not so much his initial error as his subsequent attempts to cover it up. It is the increasingly contorted web of deceit involved in the cover-up which eventually brings him to the Nightmare Stage, leading to his exposure and downfall.4
Again we see this tragic pattern in the fate of every failed rebellion against a ruling order, from the revolt of Spartacus against Rome in 73 BC to the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, from Pugachev’s rebellion in Russia in 1773 to the Hungarian rising against the Communists in 1956 or Che Guevara’s attempt to overthrow the Bolivian Government in 1967. In each case, if we examine the course taken by such a rebellion, we see how it is shaped by the five-stage pattern. Initially the rebels win such support that they dream they can actually overthrow the ruling power. As that power gathers its forces to crush them, the rebels experience increasing frustration, Finally there is the Nightmare Stage when reality closes in on them and it is clear their rebellion has failed. Their leaders and many of their followers are killed.
Where revolutions are apparently successful, we see the five-stage pattern taking a different form. It was the American historian Crane Brinton, in his book The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), who first analysed what might be described the ‘revolutionary archetype’, as he traced the remarkable parallels between the three most influential revolutions in history, those in England in the seventeenth century, France at the end of the eighteenth century, and Russia in the years after 1917. In each case the course of events was unconsciously dictated by what we can now see was that archetypal five-stage pattern.
When in 1789 the French people rose up in the name of liberty against the excessive power and privileges of Louis XVI and the French aristocracy, there was a Dream Stage when it seemed the old order, the ancien régime, was just disintegrating before them. They soon won all the liberties they were demanding. But it is in the nature of fantasy, whether in politics, sex or anything else, that it cannot reach a satisfactory point of resolution. Once unleashed, it becomes unconsciously driven to make ever more extreme demands. In Paris in the early 1790s, as the promised Utopia failed to materialise, with the king, the Father-figure of his country, still on the throne, the relatively moderate Girondins gave way to the more extreme Jacobins, who unleashed an orgy of killing, its symbolic centrepiece in 1793 being the execution of the king and his family. But this only led on to the Terror, the Nightmare Stage, when the revolution turned inward on itself and began, in the famous phrase, to ‘eat its own children’. As the revolutionaries set up their fearsome dictatorship under the Committee of Public Safety – what Robespierre called ‘the despotism of liberty against tyranny’ – it was now they themselves who were being murdered and guillotined in ever greater numbers, culminating in 1794 in the execution by his own Revolutionary Tribunal of Robespierre himself.
This was the shocking event which brought the nightmarish explosion of violence and the five-stage cycle to its climax. France fell back into a state of nervous exhaustion and uneasy calm, characterised also by a frenzied pursuit of sexual and other egocentric pleasures (the unleashing of fantasy in a new and different form) until eventually a new ‘dream figure’ emerged, the successful young general Napoleon. In 1799, when he established himself as his country’s new strong man, a new collective fantasy began to take shape. A new five-stage cycle had begun.
The Napoleonic fantasy reached the height of its Dream Stage during the years between 1805 and 1812 when, as self-proclaimed Emperor, he seemed to have all Europe at his feet. In 1812, when his fantasies over-reached themselves in his invasion of Russia, this entered its Frustration Stage, forcing him eventually into humiliating retreat. By now, in the shadows cast over Europe by his vainglorious tyranny, countervailing forces were beginning to constellate against him. This led to the Nightmare Stage of the next two years as his armies suffered a series of defeats, leaving him a powerless prisoner. In 1815 the ‘Hundred Days’ when he escaped from exile in Elba constituted another, lesser five-stage cycle, beginning with the Dream Stage of his euphoric progress through France to reclaim his throne and culminating in his nightmare at Waterloo. Finally his fantasy-career was brought to its devastating conclusion when he was taken off to that bleak and remote islet in the South Atlantic where, six years later, broken in health and spirit, he died.
As Brinton traced in his book, we can see how a remarkably similar basic pattern shaped the revolutions which took place in England in the 1640s and Russia in 1917. In each case, after a long Anticipation Stage, those who saw themselves in the shadows cast by the excessive power of a King/Father-figure eventually rose up to challenge him. In each case, as the existing order was overthrown, there was a Dream Stage when it seemed as though sufficient restraints had been placed on kingly power and liberty had been won. But in each case the demands of the revolutionaries then became more extreme. In England, the victory of the parliamentary forces in the Civil War led to the desire for a completely new type of political order. In Russia, Kerensky’s moderate parliamentary government was overthrown by Lenin’s Bolsheviks. In each case the unconscious logic of the fantasy led eventually to the murder of the King/Father, and in the name of liberty the new regime then rapidly evolved into a tyranny far more oppressive and dictatorial than the one it had replaced. Eventually, after Cromwell’s premature death, the English people welcomed back their monarchy in an explosion of rejoicing. In Russia, after the nightmare of civil war and the rise of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin came to a premature death: but only to be succeeded by Stalin, under whose even darker tyranny the revolution was to continue to ‘eat its own children’ for decades to come.5
Perhaps the most vivid historical example of the way events in real life are unconsciously shaped by this archetypal pattern was that supreme defining drama of the twentieth century, the Second World War (it was no accident, as we have noted, that this was to inspire more fictional stories than any other event in history). More specifically, we can see the pattern of that drama in terms of the rise and fall of its central actor, Adolf Hitler.
If we look at the rise and fall of Nazi Germany as an archetypal story, then the role of Hitler is that of a Tempter. The blow the German people had suffered to their collective national ego through their humiliating defeat in the First World War, followed by years of weak, unmasculine government under the Weimar Republic, led them to see their once proud, militaristic nation as having been reduced to a state of impotence and economic depression. Hitler emerged as the visionary and orator who could awaken Germany’s dark, resentful nationalist energies. With his election as leader of the nation in 1933, the Anticipation Stage found its Focus. This launched the Dream Stage of Nazi rule which was to develop through the rest of the 1930s. Inspired by its ‘dream leader’, the fantasy grew in confidence round projections of the masculine values of power and order, constantly extending its appetites as it began to take over one neighbouring country after another. When in 1939 his invasion of Poland led other countries for the first time to threaten resistance to his demands, this led to war. But in 1940 the Dream Stage reached its height, when his armies were able to march into Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France almost unopposed. A first momentary check on his ambitions was the emergence of Churchill and the failure of his plan to invade England. But it was in the nature of Hitler’s dream-state that this merely fired up his fantasy to yet greater heights, as when in 1941 he invaded, firstly, Yugoslavia and Greece, and finally, in his greatest gamble of all, the Soviet Union. This was to mark the onset, over the next two years, of the Frustration Stage. Every fantasy, because it cannot reach any satisfactory resolution, must consist of swings between anticipation and frustration; and the middle phase of the fantasy cycle marks that moment when frustration begins to outweigh anticipation. The initial euphoria of Hitler’s advance into Russia (and the start of a new, more murderous phase in his drive to exterminate the Jews and other ‘below the line’ unter-menschen) was succeeded by the setback of the first Russian winter and the entry into the war of the United States. This was followed by the even more breathtaking advances of his armies in the summer of 1942, both in Russia and North Africa; succeeded in that autumn and winter by his first really crushing reverses at Stalingrad and El Alamein. Again, as we see in so many stories, external forces were at last constellating in serious opposition to the dark central figure, and by the summer of 1943, with the defeat of his last great Russian offensive at Kursk, coinciding with the allied invasion of Sicily, the mass-sinking of his U-boats in the Atlantic and the unleashing of day-and-night assault by allied bomber fleets on the cities of Germany itself, Hitler’s dream was moving into its Nightmare Stage. By the summer and autumn of 1944, with enemies now closing in from three sides, he was in exactly that position in which we see the hero by the end of the fourth act in a Shakespearian tragedy such as Macbeth or Richard III: a cornered rat without hope of escape. In 1945 the final act of the drama wound to its archetypal conclusion when, amid the rubble of the one-time capital of his great European empire, he, like so many central figures of Tragedy before him, took his own life.
At this point, for all those hundreds of millions of people who had been drawn into the conflict against him, the archetypal response which now shaped their emotions more than anything else was that which we see enacted at the end of an Overcoming the Monster story. For six years Hitler had loomed up in their consciousness just like any monster in storytelling, vested with all the psychological characteristics of a mythical monster. He had seemed invincibly powerful, utterly heartless, devilishly ingenious: the complete personification of all that is twisted and dark in human nature. Yet now at last the monster was dead. By a titanic concentration of masculine values, strength, will and organisation, reinforced by the selflessness of the allied cause, this quintessence of evil had been overcome. And ultimately it could be seen how, like any monster in fiction, his central failing, his fundamental flaw, was that he was blind. Possessed by unconscious forces, he had, as he himself once put it, been a ‘sleepwalker’, leading his people into a colossal act of collective make-believe. As the archetype dictates, this cosmic act of hubris had eventually aroused its inevitable nemesis. Cosmic balance had been restored. Yet, for all the mighty wave of relief and rejoicing which engulfed humanity, this was not of course the end of the story, even when, a few months later, the Nazis’ collective alter-ego on the other side of the world met similar nemesis in those mushroom clouds rising over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For millions of those who had suffered under Hitler’s shadow, the slaying of the monster did not bring the unalloyed victory for light that we see at the end of a fictional version of the story. For half the peoples of Europe, the end of one tyranny meant only their falling under the advancing shadow of another, that of Stalin’s Communism. Even for many in the West, the time after the war was still bleak, as they struggled out of the ruins to live through years of austerity. For the fact was that, although it had been natural to view the events of those wartime years as like living through a gigantic, real-life Overcoming the Monster story, this had only been a projection onto the outer world of an archetype the true essence of which lies within. Certainly Hitler and his Nazi followers had been a supreme embodiment of everything the archetypal ‘monster’ represents.6 But ultimately the archetype, as we see it expressed in stories, stands not for the overcoming of any specific external monster. It runs much deeper than that, as an expression of the human need to overcome the very principle of egotism, as this operates in every one of us. In this sense, we are reminded that the real purpose of these great archetypes in storytelling is not to describe what happens in the outside world, but to show us the patterns which shape what goes on within, in that inner psychic realm from which all our behaviour in the outside world originates. It is this which explains why we so often get the impression that what happens in stories is quite different from what happens in real life: because we are looking in the wrong place for what stories really represent. This does not mean that these great archetypal patterns embedded in our unconscious do not influence how we view the outside world. They do so in countless ways all the time. But the most obvious means whereby they do so lies in how we project them outwardly onto the world, in a manner which misses their true inner purpose. And it is this which inevitably leads to frustration, when they seem never quite to fulfil the expectations we have placed on them: leading us to suppose that what only happens in ‘a story’ and what happens in ‘real life’ are two quite different things.
In 1336 the Italian poet Petrarch and his brother climbed to the summit of Mont Ventoux in Provence. Doubtless many people, shepherds and others, had ascended mountains before. But this was the first occasion in history when the climbers were sufficiently self-conscious about what they were doing to record the event. Since then, and particularly in the last two centuries, climbing to the tops of mountains such as Everest, ‘because they are there’, has become a commonplace. But it is a uniquely human thing to want to do. Animals feel no urge to reach the tops of mountains except in pursuit of food, and the question arises ‘why do human beings do it?’ Why should they wish to make long, arduous journeys, often risking death, to reach such arbitrary points on our Earth’s surface as the North and South Poles? Clearly there is a parallel between the obsessive human desire to achieve such purely symbolic physical goals and that overwhelming sense of compulsion to achieve a single, central purpose we see evoked by the archetype of the Quest. It is no accident that, when we read an account of some expedition to conquer Everest, land on the Moon or reach any other physical goal hard to attain, the story should draw us on in precisely the same way as a fictional Quest, because both are rooted in the same archetype.
The reason why our unconscious has been coded with this pattern, preconditioning us to this sense that somewhere there is a goal of immense significance which will require a long and difficult journey to reach is that it relates to our inner psychological development. The goal on which the Quest archetype is centred symbolises the state of psychic ‘wholeness’. As with any other archetype, however, it can also be projected onto the outer world. Even though those who set out to climb Everest or reach the North Pole may derive immense personal satisfaction from achieving their goal, they have not reached that ego-transcending inner goal with which the pattern coded into our unconscious is really concerned. What has happened is that their ego has become identified with a pattern which actually originates in the drive to reach an internal goal and projected it externally. And herein lies the clue to the most obvious way in which most of the archetypal patterns of storytelling unconsciously influence our lives and thinking in the ‘real world’.
In fact the only archetypal pattern which directly shapes events in the real world in precisely the sense the archetype intends is that of Tragedy. Those who seek to further their ego-centred desires by way of fantasy, whether individual or collective, do unconsciously find themselves acting out that five-stage pattern leading to destruction, exactly as we see in a story. In this sense there is no difference between the pattern as represented in fiction and that we see unfolding in real life. But the point about Tragedy is that it is the only archetypal plot which is not concerned with showing how its central figure or figures can eventually transcend egotism. All the others are concerned with this, and therefore they are essentially concerned with what is going inside the hero or heroine. But where an archetype is projected externally, it inevitably becomes itself an expression of the ego. The result is that it misses the real underlying point of why that pattern is programmed into our unconscious in the first place.
We have already seen how this works in terms of the archetype of Overcoming the Monster. Whenever someone in real life becomes possessed by an extreme form of egotism, they will inevitably be seen as a ‘monster’ by all those in the shadow cast by their egotism. Hitler, as merely one extreme example, was seen as a monster because he displayed all the psychological characteristics of the archetypal monster; and inevitably the colossal struggle required to defeat him came to be seen by all those involved as precisely like the acting out of a fictional Overcoming the Monster story, with the corresponding sense of cosmic liberation when the battle was finally over. But the fundamental purpose of the Overcoming the Monster archetype is to show that central internal conflict which exists inside each human individual, the potential battle between the power of the ego and the deeper Self. And this means that whenever the archetype is projected out onto the outside world, it ceases to be an idealised pattern and becomes prone to all the distortions which can arise when we see all the properties of the monster in someone else, without recognising that we may have the seeds of those same failings in ourselves.
We saw a vivid example of this in the contrast between the stories of Goliath and Samson, as they are presented in Jewish folklore in the Bible. Because we are shown the story of Goliath, the strong man of the Philistines, from a Jewish point of view, he is presented as an archetypal monster: immensely strong, boastful, heartless and stupid. Everything about him is dark, because he is the champion of the other side. But then we come to the story of Samson, Israel’s own strong man. To his own people, Samson was seen as nothing but a shining hero, prepared to sacrifice his own life in slaying 3000 Philistines. To the Philistines, however, he would have seemed a heartless and murderous monster. They would have seen him exactly as the children of Israel saw the Philistines’ own hero Goliath. And we saw a striking echo of this thousands of years later when, at the start of the twenty-first century, the people of Israel faced a horrifying challenge from Palestinian suicide bombers. To the Israelis they were nothing but ruthless terrorists. To the Palestinians they were selfless heroes. But when the great Jewish hero Samson pulled down the pillars of the hall, to be crushed along with all those Philistines, what was he himself but the historical equivalent of a suicide bomber?
We can see the Overcoming the Monster archetype shaping human responses to real-life situations all through history. One example was the British response to the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands in 1982. The pattern of the drama which unfolded as the British task force set out to wrest the islands back from the sinister Buenos Aires junta was precisely that of an Overcoming the Monster story (although, as the British forces journeyed across half the world to face their worst ordeals as they finally secured their goal, it also included a strong element of the Quest). From the Argentinians’ point of view, of course, the pattern of those two months exactly matched the five-stage cycle of a fantasy, ending in nightmare and disaster.
An even more vivid example was the response of the Western allies to Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait in 1990. The Iraqui leader, with his vast armies, missiles and poison gas, was built up in Western eyes as an archetypal monster; and the frustration felt by so many when the allied forces halted their advance in southern Iraq instead of driving on to take Baghdad derived precisely from their intuitive sense that the story had not been carried forward to its proper archetypal conclusion. How could this be a happy ending when the monster was left still brooding balefully in his lair?7
In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, we saw Western consciousness building up Osama bin Laden, with his worldwide terrorist organisation, into another archetypal monster, even to the point where he was imagined directing his murderous operations from that classic monster’s lair, a cave. But what we also saw was how, across the Moslem world and elsewhere, the same archetype was evoked to build up President Bush’s America into an equally classic monster, heartless and blind, using its colossal power to dominate the rest of mankind. And in that sense the stand-off between the two camps presented a perfect example of mutual projection, with each side projecting all the darkness in the world onto the other.
Another archetype which in its projected form exercises particularly powerful sway over our imagination is that of Rags to Riches. Few things have more consistently appealed to the fantasies of mankind than the dream of emerging from obscurity to fame and fortune. We see it in people’s perennial dream of having their humdrum lives miraculously transformed by a lottery win, or conceiving some idea which will bring them fabulous riches, or simply being plucked out from the anonymous crowd to become the focus of attention as a celebrity.
In our modern world we see this Rags to Riches pattern acted out incessantly, as young men and women emerge from humble anonymity to receive obsessive adulation as film stars, pop singers, supermodels, sporting heroes. But the real reason why this archetype exercises such a hold over our imagination is that, as in a fairy tale, it shows the pattern of an individual being inwardly transformed, to the point where he or she can finally be revealed in glory as their fully-realised Self. That final outward transformation we see when Cinderella or Dick Whittington appear centre-stage in their fine clothes, to mark their winning of great position and wealth, is only an outward symbol of how they have realised their full inner potential. When the archetype comes to be projected outwardly, however, as no more than a vehicle for the ego, the external transformation is all that is left. The inner transformation has been lost sight of. This is why our newspapers delight in telling us what happens to so many of the real-life Rags to Riches heroes and heroines of our time when, having apparently attained all the prizes the outward world can offer, they end up with all the problems of drink, drugs, failed relationships and general disillusionment which result from having been led on by the ego into chasing such an unreal and hollow dream.
The plot least obviously open to outward projection is Voyage and Return, because of all the archetypal patterns this is the one which has least of a purposive drive. The whole point of Voyage and Return stories is that their central figures’ sudden, disconcerting plunge into a strange, unfamiliar world happens to them without their wishing it. This has little to appeal to the ego and it therefore lacks the compelling unconscious power of the other patterns to take over our lives, although something of the archetype remains in our desire to plunge into the adventure of an unfamiliar world when we go on holiday.
The archetype of Rebirth, however, is certainly one which can exercise an enormously compelling hold over the ego, as we see whenever people imagine that they can escape in an outward fashion from some way of life that has become like a prison to them. They may imagine that, by bailing out from an unsatisfactory marriage or job without properly understanding the reasons why their life has been unsatisfactory, they can ‘make a new start’ which will solve all their difficulties. They may imagine that if they in some way ‘project a new image’ or elect a new government their fortunes may be miraculously transformed, simply because they are changing the externals without identifying the true cause of their problems. And nowhere does the power of this projection become potentially more damaging and disillusioning than when the ego becomes unconsciously possessed by the archetype of the Self, usually as a result of being drawn into identification with the collective ego of some religious or political group. The victims imagine they have gone through some profound religious or political ‘conversion’ and for a while enjoy the Dream Stage of viewing the world in a dramatically new way, convinced they have ‘seen the light’. But all this ‘ego-Self confusion’ has really brought them is an inflation of the ego, without properly discovering their individual inner self at all.
The most significant way in which the archetypal plots can tell us about the real world, however, is not when we see them projected outwards, but when we return to their original meaning and use them as a guide to understanding how human behaviour actually works. In this respect we have already seen something of how events in real life are shaped by the pattern of Tragedy. But, oddly enough, we can learn as much about the workings of human nature from that plot which seems, with all its absurdities and artificial conventions, less obviously related to the real world than any of them: the plot of Comedy.
There are two particular respects in which Comedy sheds invaluable light on human behaviour, both relating to the light it can shed on that crucially important factor in human psychology, the persona.
If human egotism is all-but universal and has the potential to create such immense problems, the chief reason why it is not more obviously intrusive in all our lives lies in the extent to which it can be hidden from view. This is one purpose of that social front we all put up to the world, the persona, when we use it as a device to reduce social stresses and strains by concealing our true feelings. In this respect we use it not just to provide a socially convenient disguise for our own egotism but to hide from other people the extent to which we have noticed theirs.
We are familiar with the image of what may happen when someone is rung on the telephone by a caller who is tiresome or unwanted. Down the line to the caller, the recipient may seem the soul of patience and politeness. But to other people in the room, he or she may be grimacing or cupping a hand over the mouthpiece to make a sense of irritation only too clear. At this level, the persona, the mask we put on for other people, is invaluable, as a means to avoid giving offence and generally to make it easier for us to relate with each other. In this respect, the persona is a social device we employ all the time, to curb our impulses to aggression, to appear friendly and sociable, to conceal the extent to which we ourselves are ego-centred.
At a deeper level, however, people may come to adopt a persona more unconsciously, and it then becomes more a matter of self-deception than of deceiving others. This is where we can talk about someone having ‘a persona problem’, one test of which is what other people say about them when they are not present. If there is a serious gap between anyone’s conscious view of themselves and what others say behind their back, this is likely to be because they are in the grip of negative aspects of their personality of which they themselves are unconscious. Such is the shadow cast by their one-sided egotism. Everyone around them can see a truth to which they themselves are oblivious. And this crucial feature of human psychology is of course particularly strongly reflected in Comedy, because a large part of the appeal of this type of story down the ages has lain in how it simultaneously shows us both sides of the picture. On one hand we see characters self-deludingly relating to the world ‘above the line’, through their image of themselves. On the other, we the audience can see only too clearly what, behind their social mask, these people are really like.
All the great comic characters in storytelling are defined by the fact that they are living in an ego-centred dream world, from which they are then brought abruptly down to earth. We see the ‘foolish knight’ Don Quixote, hubristically fantasising that he is slaying monsters with his rusty lance, and constantly having to be brought back to earth by his resolutely commonsensical squire Sancho Panza. We see the gullible Bertie Wooster constantly having to be reconnected to the real world by his shrewd but ever-tactful servant Jeeves. We see Thurber’s Walter Mitty spiralling off into one daydream after another until in each case he is brought back to reality with a bump. This is the pattern of countless television situation comedies: the fanciful Tony Hancock being brought to earth by his shrewdly cynical friend Sid James; Captain Mainwaring, the Home Guard commander in Dad’s Army, having to be brought to earth by his lugubrious second-in-command, Sergeant Wilson; Sergeant Bilko constantly trying to outwit his colonel and his fellow soldiers with some new money-making scheme and invariably being caught out; Basil Fawlty, constantly trying to preserve his persona as an efficient hotel manager, pretending to his guests that everything is under control, when behind the scenes we see only too clearly it is in chaos.
In each case the central joke of the story is the way we see how the mask keeps slipping, until the denouement when the delusions of the central figure are finally irretrievably exposed. And because the central purpose of Comedy is to show up this two-sidedness of human nature in a playful manner, no one usually ends up getting too badly hurt. Where we see the problem of the persona presented in a much darker light, of course, is in Tragedy. As we saw in Chapter Nine, ‘The Divided Self’, it is a crucial part of the make-up of most tragic heroes and heroines that, consciously or unconsciously, they try to hide the dark side of their nature from the world behind a ‘light’ mask of respectability. This is the two-sidedness so vividly personified in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where the hero’s persona and his shadow are actually split into two separate characters. But we can see the same split between the ‘light’ outward persona and the shadowy ego-self behind it in almost any of the central figures in tragedies. And equally we can see it all around us in real life.
Each of us to a greater or lesser degree has an ego-centred ‘shadow self’ which we would like to keep hidden from public view. Although we may continually be aware of it in our own heads, we try to conceal it from other people behind a mask of sociability. But there are occasions when the mask slips, as when someone loses their temper and starts shouting in an uncontrollably ego-centred manner, or is in some other respect caught out acting badly, in a way they would normally wish to hide from the world.
We then see the ‘dark self’ out in the open, in all its unattractive horror. And the essence of all those tragic situations in real life where people bring disaster on themselves is that their ‘dark self’ has taken them over to such a degree that it can no longer be hidden. In this way Comedy and Tragedy are merely looking in different ways at the same aspect of human nature. No one was more keenly aware of this universal feature of human psychology than that master of both types of story, Shakespeare. In Hamlet we hear the hero say of Claudius how ‘you may smile and smile and be a villain’. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio speaks of the ‘villain with a smiling cheek ... O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath’. In Pericles Cleon says ‘who makes the fairest show means most deceit’.
Here, of course, as in so many other respects, stories merely provide us with a mirror to how human nature actually works. And this leads on to another very important aspect of human psychology to which Comedy again provides the clue.
A recurring feature of Comedy is the way it shows us a particular group of people whose lives are shadowed by the presence in their midst of an egocentric dark figure. Thus the lecherous Count Almaviva dominates his household, the jealous King Leontes dominates his court, Napoleon in War and Peace dominates Russia, and so forth. So overpowering is the force of their egotism that it has the effect of casting everyone else into shadow, making it difficult for other people to be properly themselves.
This is precisely the effect we can see in real life whenever any social group or organisation becomes dominated by one strongly egotistical personality. We can see it in a family, a place of work, a village, street or town, any form of community, even a whole nation. The power of such egotists to dominate the lives of all those around them is enormous. They may do it in a ‘dark masculine’ way, by open bullying and aggression, in a ‘dark feminine’ way, by devious scheming and plotting, or by a combination of both. They may be aided by a group of accomplices or toadies around them, who act like extensions of their ego. But the effect of their behaviour is exactly as we see it reflected in so many comedies. It casts a malign spell on everyone in its shadow. It makes other people uneasy, miserable, fearful. It makes it hard for them to act to their full potential. And it wastes their time. Whenever we come across people who represent an extreme case of egotism, one of its most noticeable consequences is the strain this imposes on other people’s time and energy, as they try to meet the egotists’ demands or to operate around them, to an extent of which the egotists themselves are blithely unaware.
This is of course because, in being taken in by their own self-image, such egotists are largely unconscious. By definition they are blind. And one of the things to which they are particularly blind, as we have noted, is what other people say and think about them behind their back. They live in a little bubble of self-esteem, either imagining that others take them at their own face value or heedless of what these others think anyway, because such people are ‘below the line’. The views and feelings of these others are therefore of no account. Unconsciously, the egotist sees the world around him in exactly the terms in which we see it presented in a Comedy. He himself (or she) is ‘above the line’ and therefore, to those whom he sees as similarly above the line, on his own level, he can be polite, humorous, generous, even deferential. But everyone else, ‘below the line’, can be disregarded, bullied, exploited or treated with contempt. And it is they, his victims, who see most clearly just what a blindly self-centred and immature human being they are having to cope with.
We may all have come across extreme examples of this kind of egotism in our own lives and be grateful that on the whole they are exceptions. But the real reason for this type of two-facedness is that it reflects what happens to human nature whenever ego-consciousness becomes split off from the ability for selfless feeling and objective awareness. And in this respect it provides us with a model which applies not just to the psychology of individuals but also to human beings collectively.
The real problem with the ego, as the only part of our psyche through which we can be conscious of the world, is that it is so structured that its awareness must always be limited. However much we may try to eliminate its distortions and to dissolve its conflict with the objective unconscious, some element of subjective distortion and blindness must inevitably remain. And just as this applies to the consciousness of the individual ego, so it equally applies to that collective consciousness which tends to develop in any human group or society. Of course no group of human beings can establish a single, undifferentiated consciousness, through which each member of the group views the world in exactly the same way. But in any group or society it is possible to discern certain prevailing tendencies of view, even if the views of a minority of members of the group may conflict with them. Groups of human beings develop a sense of common identity, shared values, shared assumptions of what they believe to be true or important. And in this respect they develop a collective ego-consciousness.
We see this most obviously when they are swept up in some great shared emotion, as in the collective state of hysteria which grips a crowd at a football match or the sense of collective unity associated with times of war. But in any group it is possible to discern what may be called its ruling state of consciousness: that which determines what views, values and behaviour are at any time generally considered acceptable, and those which are regarded as beyond the pale, condemned as disruptive, eccentric, alien or mad. And one has only to consider what extraordinary changes come over the state of consciousness prevailing in any society through different times in history (the dramatic variations in what is considered acceptable that we see in everything from patterns of moral behaviour to fashions in clothes) to see that there cannot be any time when the ruling consciousness is objectively right, by some absolute standard, in everything it holds to be important or true.
It is naturally easiest to appreciate this in societies where the prevailing consciousness is furthest removed from our own. Until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for instance, the ruling consciousness decreed that the earth was flat and that the sun went round it. To challenge that consciousness, even though it had no basis in fact, was virtually unthinkable. As the old song had it, ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round’.
For challenging the received wisdom that it was the sun which moved while the earth stood still, Galileo faced such duress from the Papal inquisition that publicly he conceded the point (even though, as he did so, he was said to have muttered under his breath ‘but it still moves’).
We may today laugh knowledgeably at the blindness and arrogance of those inquisitors, because we have inherited the new prevailing wisdom which Galileo helped to shape; just as we may express moral outrage at all those who became rich from the eighteenth-century slave trade in the days before moral perceptions changed and the inhuman cruelty of the slave-system became obvious for all to see. But what we may not recognise is just how many firmly-held convictions making up the prevailing consciousness of our own time are just as ill-founded as the belief in a flat earth or the social acceptability of slavery: because the point about any state of ruling consciousness is that it is based on unconscious assumptions so deep and all-pervading that they are taken for granted. In any society, organisation or group, the unconscious psychological pressure to accept those assumptions is so great that only a few outsiders have the clarity of vision to perceive from ‘below the line’ how baseless and unjustified they are.
In fact the ruling consciousness of any group with a sense of common identity provides an exact parallel to the state of consciousness in individual human beings. Because it is centred on a collective ego, it can exhibit precisely the same tendency to distortion and subjectivity that we see in human individuals. As we see in, say, a political party, there will thus be a significant element of unconsciousness in the way that group behaves, whereby it remains collectively unaware of its own deficiencies. Just as we see in an individual, the more one-sided the ruling consciousness becomes, the greater the area of shadow its one-sidedness creates. And the denser those shadows, the more we are likely to find within them people who represent those values and that wider awareness which, ‘above the line’, in the ruling consciousness, have gone missing.
It was his perception of this psychological characteristic of human groups which Ibsen summarised in those words from An Enemy of the People quoted at the head of this chapter: ‘the majority is always wrong’ and ‘the minority is always right’. This is an observation which on the face of it might seem perverse, contrary to common sense, inviting the ridicule of all received opinion. But it is precisely ‘received opinion’, the ruling consciousness, which by definition can never grasp the subtle truth of the point Ibsen was trying to make. He is not of course saying that whenever the majority of the human race agree on something they must in all cases be wrong. Most people accept, for instance, that it is undesirable for human beings to go around killing each other. They are not misguided in this belief just because they are a majority. There are many issues on which the majority of people hold similar beliefs and are right to do so. But at any given time, in any human group, large or small, there will be a generally prevailing state of consciousness which in very significant respects will be blind; which will be unable to see the world objectively. It is in this sense that, as Ibsen put it, the ‘majority’, the ruling consciousness, is always wrong. And there should be nothing particularly surprising about this, since it is self-evident that in any collection of human beings there will be only a minority who have achieved that degree of self-understanding which can allow them to see the world without their perception being in some way fogged or skewed by unconscious subjectivity.8
The question then arises: if in this sense the majority is always likely to be wrong, what steps are open to humankind to try to counter this tendency to remain imprisoned in egotism and perpetual immaturity? Is there no alternative to being carried away into bubbles of fantasy and wishful thinking, followed eventually by inevitable disillusionment? We have already seen how it is precisely this question which the archetypal structure of storytelling is designed to answer. But no analysis of the hidden purpose of storytelling would be complete without seeing how it has been complemented throughout human history by another archetypal process programmed into our unconscious, in which the telling of stories also plays a central part. Such is the theme of our next chapter.