A reflection on the personal and collective importance of stories for embracing the challenges of current times, in three parts:
Part1: the importance of stories
Part2: this is a time between stories
Part3: how to find a new story
Introduction:
In the middle of a conversation, putting-the-world-to-rights, my friend said:
“Of course, the real problem is the lack of a unifying story.”
I put down my coffee mug, “Stories are a problem now too?”
“Yeah. Whatever the issue, we know what to do. Inequality, addiction, climate change. There’s no lack of good ideas. The real problem is what gets in the way of these ideas. And that’s about stories.”
It sounded neat, but I wasn’t convinced, “How can a mere story…?”
“Not stories in books. I’m talking about underlying narratives. The big mythological stories. It used to be Christianity, the British Empire and Scientific Progress that answered questions about what life was for. Some people still go there for answers, but not everyone, not anymore – and that’s the issue. We don’t have a Big Story.”
He went on to explain what we do have – a fragmented culture of mini-stories, multiple competing narratives, hunkered down in internet silos, posting vitriol at the ‘bad people’, unable to listen, let alone understand other perspectives – hence the so-called ‘culture wars’: an ongoing battle over stories.
“Like happened over Brexit?”
“Exactly.”
“And Covid?”
“Pick any issue and before long you’ll see it, a battle over stories. And until we sort that out, we’re screwed!”
I walked home through the park at dusk, reflecting on the need for a new ‘unifying story’. Could it really be that simple? And if so, was it even possible? Can you just invent a new myth out of thin air? While I agreed with the gist of my friends point about stories, something did not quite sit right. Dimly felt intuitions in the dusty corners of my mind began to take shape. Intuitions that eventually led to the following conclusions: stories are important; this period of unusual uncertainty could be called ‘a time between stories’; and while we might not be able to create a new unifying myth or story (or necessarily want to do so – as it’s a bad idea), it is possible to participate in a collective re-imagining of what life is for.
This essay will now sketch out each of these three points by way of exploring the challenges and opportunities of current times – when the old truths and certainties are broken but still hanging on, yet to be replaced by new stories.
Stories are Important
Stories are commonly understood as fiction, a fantasy tale conjured up by novels and movies and dreams. Something to be read to children, for ‘killing time’ in airports and entertainment at the end of the work day. Something that if it has an existence is a subjective one, an inner-realm quite separate from practical matters and ‘real life.’ In this view, sensible adults are guided by reason and facts and science rather than superstitious stories and myths. Yet this view is itself a story. As psychotherapist James Hillman writes, ‘The myths we believe and are in the middle of, we call them ‘fact’, ‘reality’, ‘science’.’1
The history of ideas is littered with once-upon-a-time simple truths we now call stories or myths. Creationism, flat-earth theory and geocentric theory (the sun orbits the earth) were the science of their day, taken for granted assumptions about the nature of reality. With the benefit of evolution, geology and modern astronomy it is perhaps easy to dismiss these previous world-views as fictions and believe we moderns are guided not by stories but ‘by the science.’ However, breakthroughs in quantum physics and complexity theory have shown the common-sense reality of everyday life to be what it really is, another story. At the experimental edge of science the world is a much more joined-up and mysterious place that we commonly realise, and no doubt by the time normal understanding catches up with this quantum story, if it ever does, science will have moved on again and be telling an ever weirder new story.
In the broad understanding set out here, stories are not the opposite of the real. Instead, stories are what allow us to decide what is real. As philosopher Mary Midgley puts it:
“Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.”2
Story-making is an act of imagination. As none other than Albert Einstein famously said, ‘The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.’ Intelligence isn’t just about finding a new fact or data point. True intelligence is the qualitative or ‘second order change’ that results from placing a new discovery within a wider story context. Einstein did not just add to his previous understanding, like placing a brick in a wall, he took a creative leap beyond previous understanding – like realising a wall is in the wrong place or designed badly. His quantum and relativity theories fundamentally re-imagined how modern physics understands matter, energy and time.
Stories are the imaginative patterns within which we all live, not just Noble Prize-winning scientists. In countless large and small ways narrative templates guide everyday choices. Whether voting in an election, arguing with a partner or playing a game of hide-and-seek, the information focussed upon (and neglected) and how this is shaped into understanding and behaviour is an act of imagination. All day every day, we make these stories. Human beings are story tellers. We live and communicate through stories all the time, which is what makes them so important.
This is a Time Between Stories
As a psychotherapist, my business is stories. I sit in my consulting room and listen to patients tell me stories. Of course, patients don’t see it as a story: it’s their life we are dealing with. But hopefully it is clear by now that hearing their life as a story is not diminishing its seriousness. As the psychiatrist, Oliver Sacks writes:
‘Each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and this narrative is…constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us, through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations.’3
Patients narrate to me their life story. A story woven through how they understand and feel about their past history and current situation, and what they struggle to do about it. I especially listen closely for the new or unscripted material that has shattered the habitual ‘story-fabric’ of normal everyday life. Some new story event or character that has ushered in an unwelcome dramatic tension into their lives, for example: the story of a kind person who is becoming increasingly irritable; the story of a trusted life partner who has, out of the blue, filed for divorce; or a serious illness or bereavement making proximate the previously distant story horizon of mortality and death. Patients enter therapy because of a struggle to place this unscripted material within the narrow bounds of their habitual story, as therapist Joseph Gold writes:
‘The life story is like [a] path, and when it is blocked by grief or loss, unforeseen events such as war, job loss, earthquake, or divorce, it may feel to the sufferer that the path or story cannot be continued or recovered.’4
Psychotherapy is one way to find a new story. Therapy helps make meaningful sense of the unscripted events and characters we are struggling to deal with by re-scripting an expanded story context to place them within: sometimes anger has a place; of course, she was always going to leave me, the evidence was there all along; what matters now is noticing the blossom, living one day at a time. In this sense, therapy is a time between stories, a slow re-imagining of self and world. I find the following three stages helpful in charting this passage between stories:
(1) recognise the habitual story – and how it has little room for the unscripted material.
(2) cultivate the imaginative capacity to create a new story large enough to include the unscripted material.
(3) tentatively try out the new story in everyday life – an expanded range of feeling, thinking, perception and action.
I picture this story-focussed therapy metaphorically as a caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly. The consulting room as a cocoon in which the slow vulnerable work of metamorphosis can take place. A protected place where the limited caterpillar-life has the chance to congeal and reform and gain strength into an expansive butterfly-life. Here the true work of therapy is not with interpretations but in a cultivation of the imaginative freedom to try out new roles and stories.
But it seems to me that creating this ‘safe-enough’ creative space is not getting any easier. In the same way a chrysalis hanging on a branch is a fragile state, vulnerable to external forces, so too is the work of therapy vulnerable to prevailing cultural conditions beyond the consulting room.
The personal time between stories of the consulting room exists within the wider context of a collective time between stories. Most recently, the Covid pandemic brought this connection to the fore. So many people sought help in therapy during the pandemic. Maybe this is a sign that we are ‘opening-up’ and more able to ‘share’, as one broadsheet comment piece spun it. But I doubt it. Lockdowns, bereavements, loss of work and the on-going uncertainty of culture-wars and gaslighting government messaging have resulted in an escalating mental-health crisis. A crisis brought on by living through the loss of a pre-pandemic ‘old story’ while trying to figure out and find safe ground in a ‘new normal’ story. A crisis being a ‘time between stories’, as Antonio Gramsci’s often-cited line has it:
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears’5
The pandemic is arguably a manifestation of multiple intersecting crises across material-economic, environmental-existential and spiritual-meaning levels. It is increasingly clear that a reckoning is upon us. The collective story we are living within seems to be leading us towards a cliff edge and as Gramsci notes, we can find evidence for this in the ‘variety of morbid symptoms’ appearing in consulting rooms but also in the streets, on the air-waves and certainly across the internet.
Against this background noise, it seems increasingly important to listen for the collective crisis within my patient’s personal narrative. The hearing of what it’s like to live in a prejudiced, unequal and uncertain world is the first step to finding a suitably large enough story to respond creatively within these difficult times. Of course, the wounding of childhood will always be there but to continue to emphasise a personal historical approach (as I was trained to do) makes little sense to me when patients are obviously suffering from on-going wounding occasioned by economic, political, cultural and environmental story factors. Not least because these increasingly manic and anxiety filled collective stories undermine and act against the very conditions individual therapy needs to survive: the imaginative capacity to re-imagine self and world.
How to find a New Story
A new story is discovered by way of an imaginative process rather than consciously invented. On a personal level this is clear enough. We might want to be a smarter, more confident and kinder person – it’s a nice story, why not. But a new story pattern cannot be imprinted mechanically onto life. A machine-like predictability, order and control to the change process may be desired but is seldom realised. If we try to squeeze into a pre-planned story, we either remain stuck in the old story or find ourselves slipping into a slightly altered or even quite different story without even trying, one that we could never have foreseen or predicted. Life is something we grow into, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis – and we never quite know how it’s going to turn out, what colour or shape our wings will be, or even that we will have wings, let alone learn to fly.
On a collective level, a new story or ‘unifying narrative’ cannot be consciously invented either. Of course, this does not stop people trying. Lots of groups offer Big Stories as solutions to the world’s problems, from the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates to various churches and political ideologies. Such stories could work if only everyone or at least a lot of people bought into them, which never happens.
Stories are not machines, manufactured from blueprints. Indeed, the story of the machine – with its promise of mastery and control – is perhaps the main problematic story pushing us towards the collective cliff edge. But that’s another essay.
What we need is not so much a pre-fabricated grand-new-story but the capability to slowly and gradually re-imagine the story of self and world. One of my favourite lines from the Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli in this regard is, ‘When will and imagination come into conflict, imagination wins’6. His point is that imagination is an important precursor to change. It is imagination that allows us to notice hints of possibility and then act upon them. The previously taken for granted becomes noticed and felt (‘Look at his eyes. He does care about this’). The assumed way of things becomes provisional and uncertain (‘Maybe he’s not so cold-hearted after all?’). To enter into this malleable perception is a questioning of the old and also the creation of new possibilities (‘What if I spoke to him about it. How would that be?’). To notice and allow these possibilities to take shape and colour in imagination is a crucial first step towards any form of creative action in the world. As therapist Rollo May similarly writes: ‘Imagination is the home of intentionality.’7 Good ideas, stories and motivations are not enough. Without the ability to imagine a future event or way of being as a realistic opportunity, it will be all too easy to avoid the uncertainty of the new and return to the familiar and habitual (‘No, he’ll take it the wrong way; best keep quiet’). In this way, hopes and dreams remain unrealised subjective fantasies about what could have been; whereas if the uncertainty of the new can be tolerated, then imagined possibilities will lead to real-world actions and events (“Hey, can we talk about what happened the other night?”).
The cultivation of this imaginative capacity is what happens in the chrysalis of personal change in therapy and arguably what also needs to happen across the larger collective canvas of cultural and political change. Which brings me to the heart of the problem and opportunity explored in this essay: given the need for imagination to re-story self and world, might it be that a general impoverishment of imaginative life is what makes these current times so difficult? As the French essayist Anne Le Braun wrote:
‘The assault by the modern world on dream and imagination… is a calamity that – while seemingly minor in appearance – is, in fact, the greatest problem of all because it makes possible all the other devastations threatening our world today.’8
In these turbulent times it somehow seems ever harder to imagine an alternative world that wouldn’t be even worse. Even as recently as the 1970’s when I was growing up, there seemed to be more hope around. There used to be a TV shown back then called ‘Tomorrow’s World’. It was all about a future of digital ease and electronic plenty, a hype about overcoming all illness and increasing longevity. These days I’m much more likely to watch TV scenes of collapsing ice-cliffs, mass opioid addictions or another Hollywood end-of-the-world dystopia movie. While the faithful might continue to believe that we will be ‘saved by the science’, it’s an increasingly hard sell. The mid-twentieth century promise of flying cars, moon colonies and free electricity has ended up as climate change, species extinction and the gig economy. But where did we go wrong? When did it somehow become normal for human beings to struggle to imagine a better world?
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher famously wrote of how, ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ Which is shocking, but going on the evidence not without some truth. Despite all the warnings, regardless of all the protests and in spite of realistic alternatives, industrial-capitalism continues to take us towards the cliff-edge. All of which makes little rational sense, until you realise it’s not about reason – it’s about the story. And what makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten it is a story. Without the imaginative capacity to recognise capitalism as a story and re-imagine a new one, we see it as ‘realism’ and ‘objective’ rather than the absurdity it has become. Call it what you will – culture wars, alienating technology, media brainwashing, bullshit jobs – we are living through a loss of imagination, as I wrote in my book ‘Waking Dreams’:
‘The modern view of imagination is a collective amnesia, a forgetting of a whole way of being and world view. To grow up in a culture that fails to take dreaming seriously, and dismisses imaginal encounters in everyday life as silly childhood make-believe, inevitably results in an adulthood loss of imaginative ability…It is a loss that is all the more painful for being unacknowledged: firstly, in being presented as a developmental step forward to be celebrated rather than grieved; and secondly, in not having a name for that which we have lost, let alone a route map to find it again’9
In our culture, imagination is mistaken for fantasy make-believe – a psychological interiority quite separate from the everyday objective world. What is important in this culture is the development of accurate or objective perception stripped of so-called imaginary delusions, hence the loss of imaginative life. However, to find a new story we need to recollect a broader understanding and experience of imaginative life. Not as a romantic regression to childlike innocence but as a remembering and renewal in mature adult life of an imaginative ability at the very heart of creative potential and transformation.
To begin this recovery, spend time with images: gaze upon sunsets, visit art galleries, read novels. Breathe into the felt sense of these images, places and people. Most importantly, resist the temptation to figure out what these images mean (which turns images into ideas, imagining into thinking). Instead, allow the felt meaningfulness of imaginative life to move you. In learning to validate imagining in this way you will slowly enhance your participation within the everyday life of images: in your relationships and work, in your sense of belonging and place in the world, in your understanding of the past and vision of the future.
References:
1, Hillman, James (1992, p17) We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world’s getting worse New York: Harper Collins
2, Midgley, Mary (2003, p1) The Myths We Live By New York: Routledge
3, Sacks, Oliver (1985, p105) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and Other Clinical Tales New York: Summit
4, Gold, Joseph (2001, pxv) Read For Your Life: Literature As A Life Support System Massachusetts: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
5, Gramsci, Antonio – quoted in Birkerts, Sven (1994,p121) The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age New York: FABER&FABER
6, Assagioli, Roberto (1993, p144) Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques London: Thorsons
7, May, Rollo (2007, p211) Love and Will New York: W.W.Norton & Company
8, Le Braun, Anne (2000, pix) The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm Vermont: Inner Traditions
9, Frater, Allan (2021, p203) Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life Glasgow: Transpersonal Press