Preface

"The study of stories people tell about their lives is no longer a promising new direction for the future of personality psychology. Instead, personal narratives and the life story have arrived. In the first decade of the 21st century, narrative approaches to personality have moved to the center of the discipline."

--Dan P. McAdams, "Personal Narratives and the Life Story," in Oliver P. John et.al. (eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research 242-264, at 242 (New York: Guilford Press, 3rd ed., 2008)

"Beyond dispositional traits and characteristic adaptations, human lives vary with respect to the integrative life stories, or personal narratives, that individuals construct to make meaning and identity in the modern world. Over the past two decades [1986-2006], the concept of narrative has emerged as a new root metaphor in psychology and the social sciences. Narrative approaches to personality suggest that human beings construe their own lives as ongoing stories and that these life stories help to shape behavior, establish identity, and integrate individuals into modern social life."

--Dan P. McAdams & Jennifer L. Pals, A New Big Five: Fundamental Principles for an Integrative Science of Personality, 61 (3) American Psychologist 204, 209 (2006)

"How we narrate our lives can affect us, for good or ill. Our narrative practices make an undeniable difference to our psychosocial well-being. All so-called 'talking cures'--including traditional psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to therapy and newer techniques--are motivated by this insight about the power of personal narratives. All therapies of the discursive ilk make use of narrative, in one way or another, as a means of enabling individuals to frame, or reframe, and to manage their life circumstances in richer or new ways . . . ."

"We appreciate people and things through the stories we create in our dreams, fantasies, recollections, and explanatins. But deeper understanding means getting at the narrative behind experience. To understand a troubled person we ask not only what's the matter but also what's the story. Digging deeper, we try to get the story behind the story, the experience behind the words, the social and biological substance behind the symbolism. Psychtherapy is surely an elaborate extension of this basic principle of digging below the surface to illuminate the story."

"Client problems, complaints, symptoms, and issues are really just stories about their condition, compressed into a narrative that is both limiting and revealing in what they include and what they leave out."

--Jeffrey A. Kottler, Stories We've Heard, Stories We've Told: Life-Changing Narratives in Therapy and Everyday Life x (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)

"[T]he client's narrative becomes the core of each therapy session. When a client tells a personal story, he or she gives special significance to certain events, which illuminates personal meanings. The therapist works collaboratively with the client to analyze the content and organization of these stories. As stories are told and retold over time, changes in the client's concerns, problems, and goals . . . forms the basis for the therapeutic process."

--from the cover, Hubert J.M. Hermans & Els Hermans-Jansen, Self-Narratives: The Construction of Meaning in Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1995)

"[P]sychotherapy seems to be a beneficial process whereby clients adopt a new narrative about their problem that is more helpful than the story they told before . . . . To be sure, a major revision of one's life narrative can be a difficult journey that requires the guidance of a skilled therapist. There may not be one 'true' story that people must adopt to get better . . . ."

--Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious 181 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2002)

"Our reality is created through our fictions; to be conscious of these fictions is to gain creative access to, and participation in, the poetics or making of our psyche or soul-life; the 'sickness' of our lives has its source in our fictions; our fictions can be 'healed' through willing participation, and, in this atmosphere of healing, they reclaim their intrinsic therapeutic function."

--George Quasha, "Publisher's Preface," to James Hillman, Healing Fiction ix-xii, at ix-x (New York: Station Hill, 1983)

"Patients use their stories in different ways. Some tell stories as entertainments to while, or wile, away the hour, others are reporters, others are prosecuting attorneys building a plaint. Occasionally a tale becomes wholly metaphorical in which every aspect of what-I-saw-yesterday--the large building site, the hard-hatted foreman in a control booth, the little girl in a shiny silver rain puddle in danger from a bulldozer, the passerby who intervenes--all refer as well to figures within the patient's psyche and their interplay.

A clinician is supposed to note the way stories are told. . . . A diagnosis is partly made on the basis of a person's style of telling his tale.

* * * *

The force of diagnostic stories cannot be exaggerated. Once one has been written into a particular clinical fantasy with its expectations, its typicalities, its character traits, and the rich vocabulary it offers for recognizing oneself, one then begins to recapitulate one's life into the shape of the story. One's past too is retold and finds a new internal coherence, even inevitability, through this abnormal story.

* * * *

The talk going on in depth analysis is not merely the analysis of one person's story by the other, and whatever else is going on in a therapy session--ritual, suggestion, eros, power, projection--it is also a contest between singers, reenacting one of the oldest kinds of cultural enjoyments that we humans know. This is partly why therapy pretends to being creative, and I use that word advisedly to mean originating of significant imaginative patterns, poiesis. Successful therapy is thus a collaboration between fictions, a revisioning of the story into a more intelligent, more imaginative plot, which also means the sense of mythos in all the parts of the story.

* * * *

The way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives. For the manner in which we tell ourselves about what is going on is the genre through which events become experiences. There are no bare events, plain facts, simple data--or rather this too is an archetypal fantasy . . . .

* * * *

We can be as deluded about ourselves as about the world's facts.

* * * *

I need to remember my stories not because I need to find out about myself but because I need to found myself in a story I can hold to be 'mine.' I also fear these stories because through them I can be found out, my imaginal foundations exposed. Repression is built into each story as the fear of the story itself, the fear of the closeness of the Gods in the myths which found me.

* * * *

I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories, who has not heard them, read them, acted them, or made them up. . . . Story coming on early puts a person into familiarity with the validity of story. One knows what stories can do, how they can make up world and transport existence into these worlds. One maintains a sense of the imaginal world, its convincingly real existence, that it is peopled, that it can be entered and left, that it is always there with its fields and palaces, its dungeons and long ships waiting. One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.

* * * *

The person having had his stories early has had his imagination exercised as an activity. He can imagine life, and not only think, feel, perceive, or learn it. And he recognizes that imagination is a place where one can be, a kind of being. Moreover, he has met pathologized images, fantasy figures that are maimed, foolish, sexually obscene, violent and cruel, omnipotently beautiful and seductive. Therapy is one way to revivify the imagination and exercise it. The entire therapeutic business is this sort of imaginative exercise. It picks up again the oral tradition of telling stories, therapy re-stories life. Of course we have to go back to childhood to do this, for that is where our society and we each have place imagination. Therapy has to be so concerned with the childish part of us in order to recreate and exercise the imagination."

--James Hillman, Healing Fiction 14-15, 17-18, 23, 26, 42, 46, 47 (New York: Station Hill, 1983)

Readings

Jeremy Holmes, Narrative in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 26 J. Med. Ethics: Medical Humanities 92 (2000) [online text]

Alice Morgan, Beginning to Use a Narrative Approach in Therapy, Int. J. Narrative Therapy & Community Work 2002 [online text]

Erik Sween, The One-Minute Question: What is Narrative Therapy?, 2 Gecko 3 (1998) [online text]

Vincent H.K. Poon, Narratives and Therapy: Correspondence, 53 Canadian Family Physician 1881 (2007) [online text]

Dan P. McAdams, "Personal Narratives and the Life Story," in Oliver P. John, et.al. (eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research 242-262 (New York: Guilford Press, 3rd ed., 2008) [online text]

Class Videos

Introduction

Class Video 1: How Our Brains Build Our Autobiographies [5:41 mins.] [Big Think] [Antonio Damasio]

Class Video 2: Narrative, Mythology, and Meaning [4:23 mins.] [Robert Walter, President, Joseph Campbell Foundation] ["Human beings are hard-wired for narrative."]

Class Video 3: This World is Made of Stories [6:20 mins.] [Michael Meade]

Optional: Narrative in Psychoanalysis

Interview with Steven Grosz: On Freud, Case Histories and Stories [12:18 mins.] [Steven Grosz is a psychoanalyst and author. He teaches clinical technique at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory at University College London. He is the author of The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves.] [end class presentation at 5:07 mins.]

Reference (Jordan Peterson)

Ways of Dealing with the Complexity of the World
[6:49 mins.] [you have a built-in interpretative system] [reference to Jack Panksepp] [ you live inside a story; "we have evolved story-like structures to understand the world" -- 1:41 mins.] ["we have hemispheric specialization to deal with the known and unknown, order and chaos] ["we live in stories"; you need to understand some things about stories; one kind of story you need to know something about is mythology]

The Tragic Story of the Man-Child
[7:46 mins.] [end presentation at 5:06 mins.]

[Job]: "It's like the ultimate suffering story"
[15:02 mins.] [end presentation at 5:01 mins.]

Jordan Peterson: "I Suffer Therefore I Am"
[5:42 mins.] [audio] [end presentation at 3:08 mins.]

On How You Inhabit a Story
[14:15 mins.] [end presentation at 1:41 mins.]

Planning the Ideal Future, Rationale, & Strategy
[21:42 mins.] [We look at the world through the lens of stories, through a "frame" that is a schema for action.] [end at 12:03 mins.]

2017 Maps of Meaning 07: Images of Story & Metastory
[2:11:51 mins.]

The Point of Stories
[4:41 mins.] [getting from ptA to ptB is the point of the story]

On Fictional Truth
[7:48 mins.] [end at 1:47 mins.]

How the Best Stories are Written
[3:01 mins.]

What's so special about dreams, stories, and religious systems?
[12:04 mins.] [the idea of "living inside a dream"] [delving into Freudian psychoanlytic theory, including sub-personalities; conceptualizing that is beyond our conscious control]

2016 Personality Lecture 03: Mythological Elements of the Life Story
[1:05:10 mins.]

A Funny Children's Story about Ignoring Problems
[13:34 mins.]

A Short Story Written by Jordan Peterson
[9:20 mins.] [story begins at 1:32 mins., ends at 8:04 mins.]

An Impression of Jordan B. Peterson Reading the Three Little Pigs
[3:14 mins.]

Reference (Robert Walter)

Purpose, Mythology and Religion
[1:25 mins.]

Mythic Journeys
[1:42 mins.]

On Joseph Campbell & The Hero's Journey
[1:16:14 mins.] [Walter's presentation begins at 4:00 mins.

The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell
[11:41 mins.]

Reference (Stephen Grosz)

Stephen Grosz Interview
[6:05 mins.] [audio]

Reference (Antonio Damasio)

The Quest to Understand Consciousness
[18:35 mins.]

How Our Brains Feel Emotion
[8:52 mins.] [distinguishing emotion and feeling]

What Role do Emotions Play in Consciousness?
[5:49 mins.]

What is the Self?
[13:47 mins.] Longer Version of the Presentation [49:38 mins.]

Human Decisions
[1:29:06 mins.]

This Time With Feeling: David Brooks and Antonio Damasio
[1:05:38 mins.] [poor quality of video]

Reference (Robert Walter)

On Being Possessed
[1:42 mins.] [what happens to us when primal urges are ignored, or, followed]

Purpose, Mythology and Religion
[1:25 mins.]

Reference (Michael Meade)

Occupy Your Soul
[8:07 mins.]

The Soul of Change
[8:00 mins.]

note (fate & destiny): "Each man not only stands in the crossfire of his own wishes, drives, aspirations, ambitions, and feelings, but also is involved in the whole network of human relations to which he belongs in his family, his job, and society at large. The way in which he copes with all these internal and external influences determines his fate." ~Jolande Jacobi, Masks of the Soul 22 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publ., 1976)(Ean Begg transl.)

Michael Meade on Purpose and Calling
[4:02 mins.]

Michael Meade on Fulfilling the Genius Within
[3:36 mins.]

Michael Meade Reads from "Fate and Destiny"
[1:29:51 mins.]

Michael Meade on the Two Agreements
[4:00 mins.]

A Michael Meade Reading
[1:29:51 mins.]

Gifts and Wounds
[3:56 mins.] [Michael Meade]

myth

Myth is the Ongoing Creation
[6:31 mins.] ["Myth is trying to bring the eternal into time."]

Why the World Doesn't End
[6:48 mins.]

Myth and the End of Time
[14:06 mins.] [Michael Meade]

mentors (for those more enamored with the term than I happen to be)

Genius-Based Mentoring
[4:36 mins.] Pt2 [4:22 mins.] Pt3 [4:21 mins.]

Destiny Mentoring
[3:38 mins.]

ectastic

Michael Meade on The Need for the Ecstatic
[4:23 mins.]

The Ecstatic Soul
[4:49 mins.]

Ecstatic Rituals that Bring Us Back to Soul
[8:34 mins.]

The Dance of Life
[12:49 mins.]

Reference (Narrative Therapy)