Image by Alla Tsank.
No matter how many years I’ve spent working with the idea of ‘personal myth’, and humans as mythmakers, there’s always some new insight to be gleaned, and some new way of thinking about it all to uncover. This is one of the subjects we’re covering in some depth right now as part of my ‘Courting the World Soul’ course – the core course for my wider mythic imagination programme. And it’s inspired me to write about it again here – something which I haven’t done for a good few years, now.
I began working with personal myth as part of my wider narrative psychology practice geting on for a couple of decades ago now, having discovered the threads in Jung’s old writings, in the writings of several depth psychologists in the late 80s and early 90s, and then transformed them in my own unique way by incorporating them into my work with clinical hypnosis and the creative imagination. The wider narrative approach to the practice of psychology (which I taught for a while to clinical psychologists and other health professionals in the British NHS), and which incorporates working with myth, fairy tale and a variety of mythopoetic approaches to understanding our life journeys, was the most transformative approach I’d ever encountered when it came to creating meaningful and lasting change in the people I worked with. To create change, you have to capture the imagination. And myths and fairy tales do that in spades.
So, what is personal myth, or personal mythmaking, anyway?
Well, the idea is an old one, dating back over a century; it’s fundamental to several schools of depth psychology. It arguably originated in the work of Sigmund Freud, who was the first to overtly acknowledge the archetypal and mythical threads running through our lives, when he declared to Wilhelm Fleiss in 1897 that he had awoken from a dream knowing ‘I am Oedipus’.
Carl Jung reflected in more detail on this idea that we might each be living out a particular mythic pattern. When he began to write The Symbols of Transformation, between 1911-12, he had recently taken up the study of comparative mythology in order to better identify the sources of recurring imagery in his patients’ dreams. In Memories, Dreams and Reflections, his autobiography, Jung wrote that at that time he had begun to ask himself a number of questions about myth, and to reflect on what it might mean to ‘live with a myth’, as well as what it might mean to live without one. It occurred to him to ask himself what myth he was living by. Jung later identified that he was living out aspects of a story which resembled that of the character Faust.
Jung’s approach suggests that the story we consciously imagine that we’re acting out (the story we believe we may be acting out) isn’t necessarily the story which is actually unfolding within us, because we’re unconscious of it.
The trick, then, is to uncover that story. Jung believed that if you don’t discover (or perhaps confront) the personal myth you’re living, make it conscious, and explore it and work with it, its patterns will play out again and again in your life.
Jung also believed that our personal myths are related to the collective myths of our culture; our own stories are carried within the larger stories of our time. (I’ve written about this idea at some length in The Enchanted Life.) But essentially, your personal myth is the story you are living, the story you are inside of. That story affects your sense of identity, your relationships, your sense of purpose, your sense of your own place in the world.
The conventional contemporary Jungian approach to personal myth is typified by James Hollis, when he writes in his essay, ‘Our Stories as Our Personal Myth’, that ‘we have less autonomy in the construction of our lives than we had fantasized … Your story courses through you … making choices for you, creating history, inviting futures. What is not conscious owns you, and very little is conscious, even to those who try. More than making our story, our story is making us.’
While it is undoubtedly useful to attempt to uncover the mythic patterns we might unknowingly be acting out, I’m a little cautious about such approaches to personal myth, as they can be unduly deterministic. Psychologist Dan P. McAdams, in his 1993 book, The Stories We Live By, proposed an approach which was rather less so. McAdams stressed the need to uncover the narrative of self which we have been tacitly or unconsciously living over the years, but he also focused on the fact that we continue to revise our stories as we proceed through life.
I believe that we can, and should, do so consciously – to, as Jung put it, “dream the dream onward”. For me, the main purpose of discovering the mythic patterns we may be acting out is to help us to transform them where appropriate, focusing on their possibilities rather than their strictures. Because a personal myth is not just an act of uncovering, but also an act of the creative imagination. It might be part ‘destiny’, but it is also, in good part, vision. It is, more than anything, an act of mythopoesis – a word which, literally, means ‘myth-making’. When we speak of mythopoetic identity, or our mythopoetic journey through life, we’re speaking of the human capacity for myth-making. Not in the negative, modern sense of making things up, or of creating fictions, but of consciously engaging with the mythic and archetypal in everyday life, and navigating the ways in which they change and transform as we journey on.
To understand your personal myth is to understand the ways in which you’re located within a particular historic tradition, how you as an individual are woven into a collective fabric of image and meaning. It’s to find yourself embroiled in the fundamental questions we ask about being human: Why am I here? Why does it matter? Where did I come from, and where am I going? How do I get there?
It doesn’t get any more exciting than that.
If you’re interested to know more about personal myth and other approaches to the mythic imagination, ‘Courting the World Soul’ will be available from mid-December as a self-study, on-demand course. Please sign up to my newsletter to be kept informed about enrolment.
Hello, please could you sign me up to your newsletter? Thanks, Anna
Anna, so sorry I can’t do that for people – data protection and all, as well as not having the resources – but if you click on any page of my website in the menu bar above you’ll see a signup link at the bottom of that page.
So agree with what you are saying here. When I have let myself slip into deterministic stories, I deflate and feel victimized and lost. When I remember that I am mythopoetic, my energy comes back and I know I always have a choice. I have felt for years that I am involved in the story of the Fisher King, and the funniest thing is that I can never for the life of me remember the ending. And I’ve read it many times. But always, the ending eludes my memory. And so after reading this I remind myself “Ah yes, I’m not supposed to remember the ending b/c I haven’t ended it yet”. It’s still being written through me, I am still awakening to the creation of the dream.
I would like receive information about ”Courting the World Soul.”
Ashley – there’s a link to the relevant page in the italicised section at the bottom of this post.
I love when things, beautiful things, come along in my life at just the right time. SO looking forward to This Mythic Life, and to Courting the World Soul. Thank you, Sharon!
You’re welcome, Kateri! We’ll certainly be doing more of this kind of work in This Mythic Life.
This proved very interesting reading as I prepare to tell the tale of Mélusine in Edinburgh next week end. Mélusine would have been my name if the priest had not refused to christen me with a witche’s name. It was replace by the lovely benign Béatrice. But whose story did this in bed in my unconscious and was my deep sense of soul loss due to the wrong name?
Many years ago I changed my first name.. which was a reflection of my crooked road, wanting to be ‘on the stage’ My new, and still present, name is gentler, and I still perform, and use my voice, but in other, more community based ways, bringing to light the mytho-psychology of our lives. I understand where the ‘romantic’ stories of my ancestors have influenced my feeling of who I am (or might be), and now allow myself to see the gifts I have from their legacy: how I can incorporate the imagined story as well as the facts, to benefit my own path. The pattern of story I work with, for myself and with others in Workshops,and groups, is that written about by both Jung, and, following Jung, Joseph Campbell: the Hero/ine’s story. These are so strong in the Myths.. Essentially, the basic stories of Ishtar, and Psyche, with Gilgamesh and Orpheus being deep for men. Pesonally, I love the way our ‘Fairy’ stories, of many nations, draw on the mythical pattern, and how these, too, are reflections within our own story.. our own ‘use’ of the Archetype.
Such important work for us all..thanks for your sharing, Bea, and thankyou, Sharon, for your writings.
Hesther Bate
Hello Sharon, I love your writings and all your work. As I embark on this journey to write my biomythography, I am interested in this course “ Courting the World Soul,” but I am wondering what are the main differences between that and “The Enchanted Life” and “The Mythic Life.”
Also, for this ‘on demand’ option, does it mean that I will have access to all the modules at once, so I can manage my self study as I prefer?
Thanks for clarifying.
Anais
In the fall of 1989 I was taking a 6-week creative writing course meeting once a week in Santa Cruz, California. At the 5th meeting we were given the assignment to ” write about our personal myth.” Well I was completely baffled. Had no idea what mine could possibly be. Fumbled in my mind all week but the 6th and last class was literally wiped into oblivion by the Loma Prieta earthquake same day. I never did figure out my myth as I had no idea who I was, but came to the understanding that the real me was subsumed by the roles we find ourselves in throughout life in relation to others: someone’s mother and/or daughter, someone’s spouse, someone’s employee or manager or colleague…Now as I enter my crone years I have encountered your work, Dr. Blackie, and that of others plus the time and enough solitude for reflection. I am grateful. Thank you.
VERY much enjoying the interactive Courting the World Soul, and grateful it will be available as a self study course for friends I’ve told about it! I love the idea of continuing to work with and develop our personal myth…
I love your work, and support it on Patron, in a small way, ’cause I’m a poor poet these day.
For 35 years I worked as a transpersonal therapist, also running workshops on myths, dreams, and the imagination. I also co-facilitated writing workshops in UK prisons.
If resources allowed, I’d visit Ireland again, which I fell in love with long ago.
I’ve written a page-turning psycho poetic novel, a kind of myth of my life (with a sequel in the process of editing.)
If your time permits a distraction, I’d love you to read ‘Course of Mirrors,’ which is available on all platforms, though I’d be happy to send you a paperback copy
Nice Sharon. There has always been a gap in my understanding between the idea of myth and the practical application of it. You close this gap for me here. Look forward to diving into The Enchanted Life.
Thank you for this article and for your books. I’m immersing myself in your writing and exploring mythology, as well as my own myth, all in preparation for your upcoming workshop at Hollyhock. Soooo grateful you’ll be visiting west coast of Canada. If you have time, Sharon, I’d recommend a trip to Haida Gwaii for its rich mythology and beautiful nature….. ?