This essay is about psychological reality. Paradoxically, psychological reality is mythical. It is dreamlike. There is psychological reality… i.e. we are conscious beings with unconscious experiences. Just beyond the conscious mind the psyche is constantly in a dream-state. Hence when we drift off to sleep all of that dream-world takes over.
The repression of the conscious ego relaxes its grip and soon lets go altogether and the more 'real you' takes over… the fantasist. Hence the child who has watched a horror movie that night (and was frightened by it) will have nightmares due to his conscious defenses sleeping and the fantasy material (that he has turned into symbolic images of fear) breakthrough.
Likewise the mother whose child has perished in a tragic accident, whilst not being able to repress her horrific feelings consciously… will have absolutely no success if she ever gets any sleep… because again, her repressing conscious defenses will be down. Admittedly they are extreme examples (especially the latter) but the psyche is constantly dreaming anyway in a dialogue with consciousness. The fact of the matter is that even if ones life is mundane the deeper part of the mind will be day-dreaming and if a hypnotist were to make the conscious mind sleep or to go to the borderline of waking consciousness and sleep… the individual would experience his dream world reality. This is totally irrespective of the intelligence or excitement of his life, or of any other factor.
Hence Depth Psychology speaks of mythical psychological reality. How can the nature of the psyche be both mythical and real? That question can be answered by way of an example. Imagine a young man with a mild neurotic personality. He's always stressed out about something and this makes it hard for him to function effectively in everyday life. Then one-day he is conscripted to fight in a war for his country. Whilst at war he experiences serious physical pain for himself and witnesses serious physical injury in others. When the war ends and he is able to return to his previous way of living he realizes that he is a changed man. He looks back on his previous neurotic personality as a waste of energy. He no longer gets stressed out about trivialities. But that is just the point. Previously (pre-war) he did not regard the things that stressed him out as "trivialities." On the contrary, they were only too "real." Now (post-war) he wonders why he 'stressed' so much over such trivial things? The answer is that he now knows better. He has perspective. He sees that the previous stressing was mythical psychology. The contrast is of course with serious physical pain, suffering and literal bodily death… all things that are all too real. Hence the "mythical" aspect of "psychological reality" is demonstrated by "perspective."
What is it that makes the (pre-war) young man so neurotic? Of course, there can be many possible answers to this but it is often associated with an immature ego perspective. Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung outlined much of their psychological thought in the early 20th century. Much of their thought can be read as a criticism of personal ego power. A century on it is clear that the ego and its inextricable link, "power" fail us. Ego power is anti social, rigid, one-sided, defensive, dogmatic, over-compensatory, literalizing and dividing. In all, ego-power is neurotic for oneself and for others. In the "war" example the immature ego gains perspective, and hence, "matures".
1. When thinking about psychological health I now find it helpful not to think of it as never-ending, permanent and so on. Rather I view psychological health as fluctuating with "myth" as the medicine for "lows." The ego cannot be relied on but will always be around. I simply distinguish myself from it. Hence I have a number 1 personality and a number 2 personality. The number 1 (the ego personality) is the one I distrust, yet is familiar to me. Number 2 (the one that consciously engages in myth) is the unfamiliar one but the one that is strangely medicinal. I am grateful to Marga Speicher whose essay titled "The Contributions of Literature to Psychological Growth" brought much needed clarity to my thought.
Once one withdraws projections and 'sees through' things, then virtually everything becomes myth. This may make the world seem meaningless but that is only so if one only believes in personal and cultural ego power. If one views the human as potentially creative within the context of a mythical world then one can engage with myth and narrative and experience health. Speicher lists the psychologically beneficial effects of reading as follows:
1. The sheer pleasure of reading that leads to playful exploration, that opens imagination and that feeds it.
2. The escape from one's world combined with finding attraction of another world, the opening vistas beyond one's immediate surroundings.
3. The book, character, or author as good friend.
4. The writing that expresses thoughts we dare not acknowledge in ourselves and that helps us to move them from secret existence to acknowledgment.
5. The connection to one's ancestry, to one's physical, intellectual, spiritual roots.
2. Speicher quotes Coleridge in highlighting "a willing suspension of disbelief."
3. Speicher continues, "We participate on the level of the imagination. What is 'out there' in the book enters our experience in here. A certain amount of fusion or merger with the text takes place inside oneself."
4. Speicher correctly refers (later in her essay) to this being the experience of "participation mystique."
5. For that is what this fusion or merger is. It is experienced due to "Our knowledge that we are in a fictional world [which] lets us mark off the experience. We know we are reading; we know we will not act. This knowledge allows us to sink into the fiction, to connect to less conscious experience, to reach back into less differentiated or undifferentiated levels of psychic life. We never lose our connection with reality (unless one is psychotic): we know we are reading. In one part of psyche, we are in a state of fusion and, in another part; we maintain our state of ego integrity: in that state, we can link up with the unconscious fantasies that are the ground from which the text emerged."
6. Speicher crucially deals with the heart of the matter in question here… the psychological benefits of literature. She writes "To have a deep effect, the literary work has to contain an unconscious conflict, fantasy, complex, archetypal configuration that awakens a similar one in the reader. If, what is contained in the work has an analogous component in the reader, she will respond strongly and may use the work toward her development (development may include: remembrance; recovery of affect, desire; awareness of deficits, conflicts; awareness of alternative solutions to conflict; etc). If there is not an analogous level in the reader, she will not be stirred - although she may be interested."
7. Speicher argues that the ego is affected by all of this. The "willing suspension of disbelief" equates to a relaxing of "defenses" and a "loosening of boundaries between ego and non-ego."
8. In other words, to some extent, ego defenses are down and the unconscious (i.e. the non-ego) is experienced. But when I say "to some extent" I do so deliberately because it is not like sleep where the ego defenses are entirely asleep allowing the unconscious free reign to engulf ones psyche. Indeed, from a Jungian perspective, this conscious engagement with literature can be more therapeutic than 'dreams' due to the conscious/unconscious dialogue taking place. When one really engages with the narrative one is demonstrating 'openness', hence one experiences "the loosening of boundaries."
9. between ego and the non-ego unconscious. To quote from Speicher's essay again "I take apart some aspect of myself, connect to deeper layers, and rebuild differently as I emerge."
10. and "I think that the books that affect us deeply are those which we encounter at moments of concurrence, when that which appears before us meets an inner need. We then create out of the outer reality (the book) something for inner reality. The "out there" in the book and the "in here" in us are two lines that come from opposite sides and meet in one spot: the effect of art, of book on psyche."
11. Speicher discusses the Jungian archetypal layer towards the end of her essay. Again she correctly refers to the necessity of "openness." She writes "A stimulus stirs the writer and touches the archetypal layer behind the personal impetus; archetypal energies become activated, intensify, rise to the surface. The writer opens to the unconscious content, gives shape and form to archetypal images, and releases them in the finished work. The process requires openness and receptivity…"
12. It is also here where Speicher writes of Jung's concept of 'participation mystique'. She quotes Jung himself who says "participation mystique is the secret of artistic creation and of the effect which great art has upon us."
13. "In summary… to be affected deeply by the work of art, we have to approach it with openness and receptivity in a state characterized by a "willing suspension of disbelief." In that state, we (a) partly remain observers and thinkers and (b) partly loosen ego boundaries toward merger with the work - Or: we partly maintain ego consciousness and partly lower the threshold of consciousness, entering into participation mystique…"
14. Openly engaging in narrative can be seen as a partially conscious open dialogue with the unconscious, a suspension of disbelief that is educational and therapeutic. The famous Post-Jungian Archetypal Psychologist, James Hillman is well-aware of this therapeutic or medicinal dimension. He places it all as sovereign over phenomena like politics, science etc which has much mythologizing of its own. Hillman writes… "If the progression from sanity toward mental illness is distinguished by degrees of literalism, then the therapeutic road from psychosis back to sanity is one of going back through the same hermeneutic passage - deliteralising".
15 Hillman continues… "To be sane we must recognise our beliefs as fictions, and see through our hypotheses as fantasies. For the difference between madness and sanity depends not on society or politics, upbringing or chemistry, but wholly on our sense of fiction. Even more: to take literally any of the hypotheses such as upbringing or chemistry, society or politics, as the real truth and reason for mental illness is simply mental illness itself, now in the form of an explanatory fiction taken literally rather than heuristically."
16. Myth is medicine. The ego may not see this for a long time. Indeed, often the person lives forever entirely in personal and cultural ego consciousness and hence, never sees beyond ego power. But enough people do experience the healing nature of myth to understand that it is a medicine.
