The Origin of Lifewriting

When I read Campbell’s THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND PLACES I was searching for a reason visualizing life as a “story” seemed to give students the perspective they needed to solve their real world problems. IF that was true (and it seemed to be, based on practical experience) WHY was it true?

And in Campbell, I found a quote that slapped me upside the head. Roughly, it said “our cultural stories are the externalized personal dreams. And our personal dreams are the internalized cultural stories.”

That intrigued me. What if it was true? THAT lead me to Jung and Erickson and the yogic Chakras, which suggested that we have common dreams, common psychological and social evolutionary pathways. Everyone moving away from pain toward pleasure, everyone attempting to evolve and grow the best they can. That when you see someone stunted at an earlier level of mental or emotional development, they are showing you their damage…and that EVERYONE has damage. One. Hundred. Percent.

So I looked at his “Hero’s Journey” and I assumed that he was trying to “boil down” the basic pathways he found in myth. That the people who took it too literally were missing the point, and also those who didn’t ask deeper questions.

Mine was: What if storytelling is the elders of the tribe telling the younger people “this is the path of life.” They tell stories in infinite variety, and the most popular stories get retold. And they will be popular to the degree that they resonate, that they fill some need in the listeners. And what…