Module VII·Article III·~2 min read
Myth and Therapy: Jung, Narrative Psychology, and Personal History
Political Myths and the Mythology of the Masses
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Myths as the Language of the Unconscious
Carl Jung (1875–1961) came to mythology through clinical practice. Patients recounted dreams and fantasies that contained mythological images which they had never studied. A patient with no knowledge of Egyptian mythology saw images identical to those of Egypt. A female patient without knowledge of the Indian tradition meditated on images parallel to kundalini.
Jung explained this through the "collective unconscious": a layer of the psyche common to all people, containing archetypes—universal images and patterns. This is not a memory of specific events but structures that predispose one to certain experiences. Archetypes are "charged"—encountering them causes a numinous sensation (fear, awe, reverence).
Myths are not fairy tales for children. They are a "projection" of archetypes onto the screen of culture. By analyzing myths, we study the structure of the human psyche.
Narrative Psychology: Life as a Story
Dan McAdams ("The Stories We Live By," 1993) proposed: personal identity is a narrative. We do not simply experience events—we tell ourselves a story about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. This story selects what to remember, what to forget, and how to interpret events.
Psychotherapy is often work with narrative. The depressive narrative: "All bad things happen only to me, I am incapable of changing anything." The therapist helps to find counterexamples, to rewrite the story. This is not lying—it is the choice of another angle on the same facts.
Trauma is a narrative rupture: something happened that "does not fit" into the story about oneself. PTSD is when the narrative cannot integrate the experience: it constantly "breaks through" as a flashback because it has not found a place in the coherent story.
Application in Coaching and Leadership
Leaders are storytellers. Robert Greenleaf's research: servant leaders tell narratives in which the hero is the team. Charismatic leaders tell narratives in which the hero is themselves. Both work, but create different organizational cultures.
"Reframing" in coaching: the same situation, a different narrative. "I was fired"—failure or "freedom for something new." Neither version is "true" in an objective sense—but one opens possibilities, the other closes them.
Question for reflection: How would you describe the "narrative" of your life right now—genre (tragedy, comedy, romance, epic)? Can you rewrite this narrative, keeping the same facts?
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